  Recently Horodecki et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 100402 (2003)] introduced an
important quantum information processing paradigm, in which two parties sharing
many copies of the same bipartite quantum state distill local pure states, by
means of local unitary operations assisted by a one-way (two-way) completely
dephasing channel. Local pure states are a valuable resource from a
thermodynamical point of view, since they allow thermal energy to be converted
into work by local quantum heat engines. We give a simple
information-theoretical characterization of the one-way distillable local
purity, which turns out to be closely related to a previously known operational
measure of classical correlations, the one-way distillable common randomness.
