Seminars

Emergence of spontaneous collective oscillations in dense Human crowds

Massive crowd gatherings form some of the most dangerous and unpredictable environments [1]. However, we lack quantitative characterizations of their dynamics and the heuristic principles used to explain and predict their motion remain elusive. In this talk, I will present our analysis of the dynamics of thousands of packed individuals in a model system, namely, the opening ceremony of the festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain [2]. This analysis reveals that at extreme densities crowds experience self-sustained oscillatory flows, which echo the correlated orbital motion of hundreds of individuals in the absence of any external guidance. I will then detail how the combination of mechanics and symmetry principles has allowed us to establish a robust predictive model of dense crowds inferred from our measurements to elucidate this emergent chiral dynamics. In particular, we establish that the self-organization of crowds into macroscopic oscillators originates from transverse frictional forces between the crowd and the ground.

[1] D. Helbing, A. Johansson, and H. Z. Al-Abideen. ``Dynamics of crowd disasters : An empirical study''. Physical Review E, 75(4), 046109 (2007).

[2] F. Gu*, B. Guiselin*, N. Bain, I. Zuriguel, and D. Bartolo. ``Emergence of collective oscillations powered by odd friction in massive crowds''. Submitted (2024).