The use of ancillary quantum systems known as catalysts is known to be able to enhance the capabilities of entanglement transformations under local operations and classical communication. However, the limits of these advantages have not been determined and in particular it is not known if such assistance can overcome the known restrictions on asymptotic transformation rates—notably the existence of bound entangled (undistillable) states. Here we establish a general limitation on entanglement catalysis: we show that catalytic transformations can never allow for the distillation of entanglement from a bound entangled state with positive partial transpose, even if the catalyst may become correlated with the system of interest and even under permissive choices of free operations. This precludes the possibility that catalysis may make entanglement theory asymptotically reversible. Our methods are based on asymptotic bounds for the distillable entanglement and entanglement cost assisted by correlated catalysts.

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• Quantum correlations in quantum information
• Quantum correlations, foundations & formalism
• Quantum information processing
• Quantum information theory