Arianna Bottinelli will give a presentation of her work on April 12th, 14h, in the Aurigny room,
Arianna Bottinelli is a postdoctoral fellow at Nordita (Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stockholm), where she conducts research on collective motion in high-density human crowds and crowd disasters.
The physics of high-density crowds
During mass events such as concerts, parades, sporting events, and pilgrimages, crowd density can become exceptionally high, causing the emergence of sometimes deadly collective motion such as crowd turbulence and density waves. In such extreme conditions, conventional information transfer and communication between human subjects appear to break down, preventing information about injurious situations to spread, and counteractions to be immediately taken. Understanding the physical mechanisms underlying collective motion in the extreme case presented by high-density crowds, and how this is coupled with information transfer, constitutes a fundamental step in predicting and preventing the dangers arising at mass gatherings.
Taking inspiration from the physics of jammed granular materials, we were able to identify Goldstone modes, soft spots, and stochastic resonance, as potential mechanisms for dangerous emergent collective motions in crowds.
I will give an overview of the main results obtained by applying mode analysis to crowd simulations, and discuss the most recent insights gained by extending these techniques to crowds video footage. I will also show some preliminary results on how traditional models of information dynamics can be spatially embedded to analyze the breakdown of information transfer in high-density scenarios.
