Certain quantum information tasks require entanglement of assistance, namely
a reduction of a tripartite entangled state to a bipartite entangled state via
local measurements. We establish that 'concurrence of assistance' (CoA)
identifies capabilities and limitations to producing pure bipartite entangled
states from pure tripartite entangled states and prove that CoA is an
entanglement monotone for (2×2×n)-dimensional pure states.
Moreover, if the CoA for the pure tripartite state is at least as large as the
concurrence of the desired pure bipartite state, then the former may be
transformed to the latter via local operations and classical communication, and
we calculate the maximum probability for this transformation when this
condition is not met.Comment: 5 pages, no figure