Rates of asymptotic entanglement transformations for bipartite mixed states: Maximally entangled states are not special

We investigate the asymptotic rates of entanglement transformations for bipartite mixed states by local operations and classical communication (LOCC). We analyse the relations between the rates for different transitions and obtain simple lower and upper bound for these transitions. In a transition from one mixed state to another and back, the amount of irreversibility can be different for different target states. Thus in a natural way, we get the concept of "amount" of irreversibility in asymptotic manipulations of entanglement. We investigate the behaviour of these transformation rates for different target states. We show that with respect to asymptotic transition rates under LOCC, the maximally entangled states do not have a special status. In the process, we obtain that the entanglement of formation is additive for all maximally correlated states. This allows us to show irreversibility in asymptotic entanglement manipulations for maximally correlated states in 2x2. We show that the possible nonequality of distillable entanglement under LOCC and that under operations preserving the positivity of partial transposition, is related to the behaviour of the transitions (under LOCC) to separable target states.