Spontaneous emergence of counterclockwise vortex motion in assemblies of pedestrians roaming within an enclosure

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Echeverria, Iñaki | Nicolas, Alexandre | Hidalgo, Raúl Cruz | Garcimartin, Angel | Zuriguel, Iker

Edité par CCSD ; Nature Publishing Group -

International audience. The emergence of coherent vortices has been observed in a wide variety of many‑body systems such as animal flocks, bacteria, colloids, vibrated granular materials or human crowds. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that pedestrians roaming within an enclosure also form vortex‑likepatterns which, intriguingly, only rotate counterclockwise. By implementing simple numerical simulations, we evidence that the development of swirls in many‑particle systems can be described as a phase transition in which both the density of agents and their dissipative interactions with the boundaries play a determinant role. Also, for the specific case of pedestrians, we show that the preference of right‑handed people (the majority in our experiments) to turn leftwards when facing a wall is the symmetry breaking mechanism needed to trigger the global counterclockwise rotation observed.

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