  Invariance under local unitary operations is a fundamental property that must
be obeyed by every proper measure of quantum entanglement. However, this is not
the only aspect of entanglement theory where local unitaries play a relevant
role. In the present work we show that the application of suitable local
unitary operations defines a family of bipartite entanglement monotones,
collectively referred to as "mirror entanglement". They are constructed by
first considering the (squared) Hilbert-Schmidt distance of the state from the
set of states obtained by applying to it a given local unitary. To the action
of each different local unitary there corresponds a different distance. We then
minimize these distances over the sets of local unitaries with different
spectra, obtaining an entire family of different entanglement monotones. We
show that these mirror entanglement monotones are organized in a hierarchical
structure, and we establish the conditions that need to be imposed on the
spectrum of a local unitary for the associated mirror entanglement to be
faithful, i.e. to vanish on and only on separable pure states. We analyze in
detail the properties of one particularly relevant member of the family, the
"stellar mirror entanglement" associated to traceless local unitaries with
nondegenerate spectrum and equispaced eigenvalues in the complex plane. This
particular measure generalizes the original analysis of [Giampaolo and
Illuminati, Phys. Rev. A 76, 042301 (2007)], valid for qubits and qutrits. We
prove that the stellar entanglement is a faithful bipartite entanglement
monotone in any dimension, and that it is bounded from below by a function
proportional to the linear entropy and from above by the linear entropy itself,
coinciding with it in two- and three-dimensional spaces.
