Optimal two-particle entanglement by universal quantum processes

Within the class of all possible universal (covariant) two-particle quantum processes in arbitrary dimensional Hilbert spaces those universal quantum processes are determined whose output states optimize the recently proposed entanglement measure of Vidal and Werner. It is demonstrated that these optimal entanglement processes belong to a one-parameter family of universal entanglement processes whose output states do not contain any separable components. It is shown that these optimal universal entanglement processes generate antisymmetric output states and, with the single exception of qubit systems, they preserve information about the initial input state.