Macroscopic chaos in globally coupled maps (Q1809129)

A quantitative characterization of the coherent evolution in globally coupled maps that show macroscopic chaos is proposed. It is shown that the recently introduced finite size Lyapunov exponent gives a suitable quantitative characterization of the macroscopic chaos. In other words, a macroscopic characteristic time is identified by means of a Lyapunov exponent that is effective on the macroscopic scales and which, in general, is much smaller than the usually defined one. The problem of the choice of the norm in the definition of the Lyapunov exponent for the one-body description is also discussed.