Macroscopic quantum electrodynamics

We investigate the quantum electrodynamics of many-body systems, and discuss the circumstances under which the results are identical to the results of classical electrodynamics. This classical behavior is shown to occur when the motion of a large number of the particles is correlated. The correlation manifests itself in a form of coherence which is characterized by the many-body quantum states being very nearly an eigenstate of the current operator. We present several explicit examples of quantum states which exhibit such coherence and show that they give the expected classical results. Nowhere do we assume h → 0