Optimal teleportation with a mixed state of two qubits.

We consider a single copy of a mixed state of two qubits and derive the optimal trace-preserving local operations assisted by classical communication such as to maximize the fidelity of teleportation that can be achieved with this state. These optimal local operations turn out to be implementable by one-way communication and always yield a teleportation fidelity larger than 2/3 if the original state is entangled. This maximal achievable fidelity is an entanglement measure and turns out quantifying the minimal amount of mixing required to destroy the entanglement in a quantum state.