Are the Laws of Entanglement Theory Thermodynamical?

We argue that on its face, entanglement theory satisfies laws equivalent to thermodynamics if the theory can be made reversible by adding certain bound entangled states as a free resource during entanglement manipulation. Subject to plausible conjectures, we prove that this is not the case in general, and discuss the implications of this for the thermodynamics of entanglement.

Figure 1

Reversible and irreversible processes in thermodynamics.