Broadcasting of entanglement and universal quantum cloners

We study broadcasting of entanglement where we use universal quantum cloner s (in general less optimal) to perform local cloning operations. We show th at there is a lower bound on the fidelity of the universal quantum cloners that can be used for broadcasting. We prove that an entanglement is optimal ly broadcast only when optimal quantum cloners an used for local copying. W e also show that broadcasting of entanglement into more than two entangled pairs is forbidden using only local operations. [S1050-2947(99)01709-6].