Boundary Effects in the Critical Scaling of Entanglement Entropy in 1D Systems

We present exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group results for the entanglement entropy of critical spin-1/2 XXZ chains. We find that open boundary conditions induce an alternating term in both the energy density and the entanglement entropy which are approximately proportional, decaying away from the boundary with a power law. The power varies with anisotropy along the critical line and is corrected by a logarithmic factor, which we calculate analytically, at the isotropic point. A heuristic resonating valence bond explanation is suggested.