Human collective behavior can vary from calm to panicked depending on social context. Using videos publicly available online, we study the highly energized collective motion of attendees at heavy metal concerts. We find these extreme social gatherings generate similarly extreme behaviors: a disordered gas-like state called a mosh pit and an ordered vortex-like state called a circle pit. Both ph...

We have presented a numerical model of a collective opinion formation procedure to explain political phenomena such as two-party and multi-party systems in politics, political unrest, military coup d’etats and netizen revolutions. Nonlinear interaction with binary and independent decision making processes can yield various collective behaviors or collective political opinions. Statistical physi...

We recall the successes of the Hubbard-Stratonovich Transformation (HST) of many-body theory, point out its failure to cope with competing channels of collective phenomena and show how to overcome this by Variational Perturbation Theory. That yields exponentially fast converging results, thanks to the help of a variety of collective classical fields, rather than a fluctuating collective quantum...

Preface to a focus issue of invited articles that review recent progress in studying the fundamental physics of collective phenomena associated with coupling of confined photonic, plasmonic, electronic and phononic states and in exploiting these phenomena to engineer novel devices for light generation, optical sensing, and information processing.

Spatial animat agents can be used to construct sophisticated spatially-rich macroscopic models to study complex and emergent phenomena based only on localised microscopic control parameters. We have developed a predatorprey based animat model that we have successfully used to explore various collective behaviours. In studying collective phenomena using computer models it is important to develop...

The research described in this paper concerns alliance formation and norms of behavior in communities of intelligent agents. An alliance is composed of intelligent agents that have made a deliberate decision to join forces to achieve alliance goals. Norms are defined as limitations on agents, such as legal constraints on individual actions. The aim of this research is to arrive at descriptive a...

This article is on collective phenomena in pedestrian dynamics during the assembling and dispersal of gatherings. To date pedestrian dynamics have been primarily studied in the natural and engineering sciences. Pedestrians are analyzed and modeled as driven particles revealing self-organizing phenomena and complex transport characteristics. However, pedestrians in crowds also behave as living b...

Financial and economic history is strewn with bubbles and crashes, booms and busts, crises and upheavals of all sorts. Understanding the origin of these events is arguably one of the most important problems in economic theory. In this paper, we review recent efforts to include heterogeneities and interactions in models of decision. We argue that the so-called Random Field Ising model (RFIM) pro...

For a detailed review of this subject I refer to a recent paper [1]; in this talk I only very briefly comment on a few most important questions: (a) Very recent significant progress in viscous hydrodynamics calculations (b) Initial eccentricity/flow fluctuations, the effect of which has been clarified recently (c) Initial conditions, in particular the role of the gradients in the initial veloci...