Bound entangled states with extremal properties

Following recent work of Beigi and Shor, we investigate PPT states that are "heavily entangled." We first exploit volumetric methods to show that in a randomly chosen direction, there are PPT states whose distance in trace norm from separable states is (asymptotically) at least 1/4. We then provide explicit examples of PPT states which are nearly as far from separable ones as possible. To obtain a distance of 2-{\epsilon} from the separable states, we need a dimension of 2^{poly(\log(1/\epsilon))}, as opposed to 2^{poly(1/\epsilon)} given by the construction of Beigi and Shor. We do so by exploiting the so called {\it private states}, introduced earlier in the context of quantum cryptography. We also provide a lower bound for the distance between private states and PPT states and investigate the distance between pure states and the set of PPT states.