A semidefinite program for distillable entanglement

We show that the maximum fidelity obtained by a positive partial transpose (p.p.t.) distillation protocol is given by the solution to a certain semidefinite program. This gives a number of new lower and upper bounds on p.p.t. distillable entanglement (and thus new upper bounds on 2-locally distillable entanglement). In the presence of symmetry, the semidefinite program simplifies considerably, becoming a linear program in the case of isotropic and Werner states. Using these techniques, we determine the p.p.t. distillable entanglement of asymmetric Werner states and “maximally correlated” states. We conclude with a discussion of possible applications of semidefinite programming to quantum codes and 1-local distillation