I'll give it a try: Jesse L. Silverberg, Matthew Bierbaum, James P. Sethna, and Itai Cohen, Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 228701 (2013): "Collective Motion of Humans in Mosh and Circle Pits at Heavy Metal Concerts". (I got the idea from a Sixty Symbols video.)

http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.228701

It's not written by someone famous but it is quite readable, has a very practical real-world application and still is used to combine their results with fundamentals from thermodynamics (in that the mass of people basically behaves like an ideal gas). The paper has some math in it, but only mildly, so, combined with the very modern methods that the students can relate to (they use YouTube videos as data sources), it should keep the students interested. It is also not very long :-)