Phases of mosh pits

Researchers at Cornell University have used video footage taken at rock concerts to draw an analogy between the behaviour of heavy metal gig attendees in mosh pits and the motion of particles in gases. The authors report watching “over 10² videos containing footage of mosh pits” and claim that the motion of moshers is welldescribed by a two-dimensional Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. The researchers developed a simulation of the behaviour of mosh pits and argue that the crowd can exist in different states including a gas-like state (a mosh pit) and a vortex-like state (a circle pit).