  Quantum phase transitions occur at zero temperature and involve the
appearance of long-range correlations. These correlations are not due to
thermal fluctuations but to the intricate structure of a strongly entangled
ground state of the system. We present a microscopic computation of the scaling
properties of the ground-state entanglement in several 1D spin chain models
both near and at the quantum critical regimes. We quantify entanglement by
using the entropy of the ground state when the system is traced down to $L$
spins. This entropy is seen to scale logarithmically with $L$, with a
coefficient that corresponds to the central charge associated to the conformal
theory that describes the universal properties of the quantum phase transition.
Thus we show that entanglement, a key concept of quantum information science,
obeys universal scaling laws as dictated by the representations of the
conformal group and its classification motivated by string theory. This
connection unveils a monotonicity law for ground-state entanglement along the
renormalization group flow. We also identify a majorization rule possibly
associated to conformal invariance and apply the present results to interpret
the breakdown of density matrix renormalization group techniques near a
critical point.
