Novel Schemes for Directly Measuring Entanglement of General States

An intrinsic relation between maximally entangled states and entanglement measures is revealed, which plays a role in establishing connections for different entanglement quantifiers. We exploit the basic idea and propose a framework to construct schemes for directly measuring entanglement of general states. In particular, we demonstrate that rank-1 local factorizable projective measurements, which are achievable with only one copy of an entangled state involved at a time in a sequential way, are sufficient to directly determine the concurrence of an arbitrary two-qubit entangled state.