Recently Horodecki et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 100402 (2003)] introduced an important quantum information processing paradigm, in which two parties sharing many copies of the same bipartite quantum state distill local pure states by means of local unitary operations assisted by a one-way (two-way) completely dephasing channel. Local pure states are a valuable resource from a thermodynamical point of view, since they allow thermal energy to be converted into work by local quantum heat engines. We give a simple information-theoretical characterization of the one-way distillable local purity, which turns out to be closely related to a previously known operational measure of classical correlations, the one-way distillable common randomness.

• Received 22 February 2005

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.71.062303