Superposition in quantum states of large systems plays a crucial role in quantum theory and has important fundamental as well as technological implications, ranging from quantum measurement theory to quantum computers. The power of the potential implications of such states lies in the quantum coherence, as measured by the amount of entanglement and other quantum correlations, between its microscopic and macroscopic sectors. We show that in contrast to other macroscopic superposition states, it is possible to choose the states of the macroscopic sector in a way that the resulting state, which we term as the
HC state, has quantum coherence that is resistant to the twin effects of environmental noise: (a) local decoherence on all the particles and (b) loss of a finite fraction of its particles. The states of the macroscopic sector of the
HC state are macroscopically distinct in terms of their violation of Bell inequality.
We study quantum states produced by optimal phase covariant quantum cloners. We argue that cloned quantum superpositions are not macroscopic superpositions in the spirit of Schrödinger's cat, despite their large particle number. This is indicated by calculating several measures for macroscopic superpositions from the literature, as well as by investigating the distinguishability of the two superposed cloned states. The latter rapidly diminishes when considering imperfect detectors or noisy states and does not increase with the system size. In contrast, we find that cloned quantum states themselves are macroscopic, in the sense of both proposed measures and their usefulness in quantum metrology with an optimal scaling in system size. We investigate the applicability of cloned states for parameter estimation in the presence of different kinds of noise.