2014/03/31 by Roman Mani, Lucas Böttcher, Mani, Roman +5
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Mathematical Theories and Applications #Experimental and Theoretical Physics Studies #FOS: Physical sciences #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #Sports Dynamics and Biomechanics #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1404.7460
openalex publication_date 2014/03/31 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study a one-dimensional system of spatially extended particles, which are fixated to regularly spaced locations by means of elastic springs. The particles are assumed to be driven by a Gaussian noise and to have dissipative, energy-conserving or anti-dissipative (flipper-like) interactions, when the particle density exceeds a critical threshold. While each particle in separation shows a wellbehaved behavior characterized by a Gaussian velocity distribution, the interaction of particles at high densities can cause an avalanche-like momentum and energy transfer, which can generate steep power laws without a well-defined variance and mean value. Specifically, the velocity variance increases dramatically towards the free boundaries of the driven-many-particle system. The model might also have some relevance for a better understanding of crowd disasters. Our results suggest that these are most likely caused by passive momentum transfers, and not by active pushing.