Emergent Structural Mechanisms for High-Density Collective Motion Inspired by Human Crowds

Abstract

Collective motion of large human crowds often depends on their density. In extreme cases like heavy metal concerts and Black Friday sales events, motion is dominated by physical interactions instead of conventional social norms. Here, we study an active matter model inspired by situations when large groups of people gather at a point of common interest. Our analysis takes an approach developed for jammed granular media and identifies Goldstone modes, soft spots, and stochastic resonance as structurally-driven mechanisms for potentially dangerous emergent collective motion.

5 pages, 4 figures; Supplemental Materials included at end of file

References in corpus (4)

• The Dynamics of Crowd Disasters: An Empirical Study
• Analytical Approach to Continuous and Intermittent Bottleneck Flows
• Jamming Criticality Revealed by Removing Localized Buckling Excitations
• Elementary Excitation Modes in a Granular Glass above Jamming

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