Entanglement of formation of bipartite quantum states.

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.