macroscopicity

English

Etymology

macroscopic +‎ -ity

Noun

macroscopicity (countable and uncountable, plural macroscopicities)

1. (uncountable) The quality or state of being macroscopic.
   • 2014 September, Gregg Jaeger, “What in the (quantum) world is macroscopic?”, in American Journal of Physics, volume 82, number 9, pages 896–905:

     ...it appears to be a small step from (1) and (2) to the identification of a sufficiently large mass with a macroscopic mass and, by analogy, to the consideration as macroscopic any system having sufficiently large quantum numbers associated with it, as well as to accept such macroscopicity as sufficient for classicality.

   • 2015, Malte C. Tichy, Chae-Yeun Park, Minsu Kang, Hyunseok Jeong, Klaus Mølmer, “Is macroscopic entanglement a typical trait of many-particle quantum states?”, in arXiv‎^[1]:

     In contrast, permutation-symmetric pure states feature rather low geometric entanglement and strong and robust macroscopicity

2. (countable, quantum mechanics) A formal measure of the size of a quantum mechanical system or experiment which, while typically larger than the atomic scale, has not undergone decoherence.
   • 2014, Stefan Nimmrichter, Macroscopic Matter-Wave Interferometry, Springer, page 230:

     Macroscopicities of a representative selection of quantum superposition experiments with mechanical systems plotted against their publication date (adapted from [17] with additional data).

   • 2014, M. Arndt, et al., Matter wave interferometry with composite quantum objects, G. M. Tino, M. A. Kasevich (editors), Interferometria atomica, Società Italiana di Fisica, [jointly published as Atom Interferometry, IOS Press], page 136,

     Macroscopicities for a selection of neutron, atom, molecule and SQUID superposition experiments ordered according to their publication date.