Distilling entanglement from arbitrary resources

We obtain the general formula for the optimal rate at which singlets can be distilled from any given noisy and arbitrarily correlated entanglement resource by means of local operations and classical communication (LOCC). Our formula, obtained by employing the quantum information spectrum method, reduces to that derived by Devetak and Winter [Proc. R. Soc. London, Ser. A 461, 207 (2005)], in the special case of an independent and identically distributed resource. The proofs rely on a one-shot version of the so-called hashing bound, which, in turn, provides bounds on the one-shot distillable entanglement under general LOCC. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3483717]