  The occurrence of entanglement sudden death in the evolution of a bipartite
system depends on both the initial state and the channel responsible for the
evolution. An extreme case is that of entanglement braking channels, which are
channels that acting on only one of the subsystems drives them to full
disentanglement regardless of the initial state. In general, one can find
certain combinations of initial states and channels acting on one or both
subsystems that can result in entanglement sudden death or not. Neither the
channel nor the initial state, but their combination, is responsible for this
effect, but their combination. In this work we show that, in all cases, when
entanglement sudden death occurs, the evolution can be mapped to that of an
effective entanglement breaking channel on a modified initial state. Our
results allow to anticipate which states will suffer entanglement sudden death
or not for a given evolution. An experiment with polarization entangled photons
demonstrates the utility of this result in a variety of cases.
