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Non-equilibrium physics

Freezing by heating

Nature volume 404, pages 718–719 (2000)Cite this article

Everyone has noticed that cooperation among individuals can become less efficient when the individuals are nervous or lack a clear direction. Why is this? Writing in Physical Review Letters, Dirk Helbing, Illés Farkas and Tamás Vicsek1 show that increasing the erratic motions of interacting entities can lead to the breakdown of an efficient pattern of interactions and finally produce a lasting deadlock. This work may be relevant to the movement of light (rising) and heavy (sinking) particles in a vertical column of fluid, and in a wider context to the movement of pedestrians or vehicles in constrained spaces and under heavy traffic conditions.

Transitions induced by random fluctu-ations or noise have always fascinated physicists2,3,4,5. For example, stochastic resonance is a noise-related effect whereby fluctuations can vastly improve the detection of a signal. Helbing et al.1 study a system consisting of a relatively small number of entities, about 100, driven in opposite directions under the influence of noise and interacting through a simple, repulsive force. Such driven interactions take place under non-equilibrium conditions, which means they do not have to follow the expected behaviour patterns of classical equilibrium systems6,7. In their model, Helbing et al. discover a new transition that they call ‘freezing by heating’. To order a system by heating violates the thermo-dynamic principles that govern macroscopic equilibrium systems.

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Figure 1: Freezing by heating according to a study by Helbing et al.1.

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  1. the Center for Polymer Studies Department of Physics, Boston University, 590 Commonwealth Avenue , Boston, 02215, Massachusetts, USA

    H. Eugene Stanley

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  1. H. Eugene Stanley
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Correspondence to H. Eugene Stanley.

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Stanley, H. Freezing by heating. Nature 404, 718–719 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35008188

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