We consider the manipulation of multipartite entangled states in the limit of
many copies under quantum operations that asymptotically cannot generate
entanglement. As announced in [Brandao and Plenio, Nature Physics 4, 8 (2008)],
and in stark contrast to the manipulation of entanglement under local
operations and classical communication, the entanglement shared by two or more
parties can be reversibly interconverted in this setting. The unique
entanglement measure is identified as the regularized relative entropy of
entanglement, which is shown to be equal to a regularized and smoothed version
of the logarithmic robustness of entanglement.
Here we give a rigorous proof of this result, which is fundamentally based on
a certain recent extension of quantum Stein's Lemma proved in [Brandao and
Plenio, Commun. Math. 295, 791 (2010)], giving the best measurement strategy
for discriminating several copies of an entangled state from an arbitrary
sequence of non-entangled states, with an optimal distinguishability rate equal
to the regularized relative entropy of entanglement. We moreover analyse the
connection of our approach to axiomatic formulations of the second law of
thermodynamics.Comment: 21 pages. revised versio
