We give an explicit tight lower bound for the entanglement of formation for arbitrary bipartite mixed states by using the convex hull construction of a certain function. This is achieved by revealing a novel connection among the entanglement of formation, the well-known Peres-Horodecki, and realignment criteria. The bound gives a quite simple and efficiently computable way to evaluate quantitatively the degree of entanglement for any bipartite quantum state.

• Received 16 July 2005

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.210501