On bound entanglement assisted distillation

We investigate asymptotic distillation of entanglement in the presence of an unlimited amount of bound entanglement for bi-partite systems. We show that the distillability is still bounded by the relative entropy of entanglement. This offers a strong support to the fact that bound entanglement does not improve distillation of entanglement. PACS number(s): 03.65.Bz, 89.70.+c,89.80.+h keywords: entanglement, relative entropy Recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest in understanding and quantifying the amount of entanglement in a given state of bi-partite and multi-partite quantum systems (for a review see [1]). Entanglement of bi-partite systems in a pure state is well understood asymptotically; it can be quantified by a single measure von Neumann’s reduced entropy [2], [3], [4]. In the finite (non-asymptotic) case [5], however, there are still many surprises. For example, one of these surprises is the existence of catalytic processes recently found by Jonathan and Plenio [6]. Multi-partite systems are, on the other hand, not well understood e-mail address: [email protected]