Task-Oriented Maximally Entangled States

We introduce the notion of a task-oriented maximally entangled state (TMES). This notion depends on the tasks for which a quantum state is used as the resource. This concept may be more fruitful than that of a general maximally entangled state in the case of a multipartite system. We illustrate this idea by giving an operational definition of maximally entangled states on the basis of communication tasks of teleportation and superdense coding. We also give examples and a procedure to obtain such TMESs for {\em n}-qubit systems.