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 of and limitations to producing pure bipartite entangled states from pure tripartite entangled states and prove that COA is an entanglement monotone for $(2\times 2\times n)$-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.

• Received 27 March 2005

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.72.042329