Entanglement of Assistance

Abstract

The newfound importance of ``entanglement as a resource'' in quantum computation and quantum communication compels us to quantify it in as many distinct ways as possible. Here we explore a new measure of entanglement for mixed quantum states of bipartite systems, which we name the Entanglement of Assistance. We show it to be the maximum average entanglement of all pure-state ensembles consistent with the given density matrix. In this sense, the Entanglement of Assistance is a quantity directly dual to the more standard Entanglement of Formation. With the help of lower and upper bounds, we calculate the Entanglement of Assistance for a few cases and use these results to show that it possesses the surprising property of superadditivity. We believe that this may shed some light on the question of additivity for the Entanglement of Formation.