Pushing-Induced Arrest Across Lattices and Dimensions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how obstacle pushing affects transport in lattices, revealing a new trapping mechanism in 3D that explains pushing-induced arrest through exponential survival dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel trapping model based on rare door-closing events, extending understanding of pushing-induced arrest across different lattice dimensions.

Findings

Pushing-induced arrest is governed by rare door-closing events in 3D.

The model predicts mean-squared displacement using short-time diffusion and trapping probabilities.

Confinement dynamics follow an exponential survival pattern.

Abstract

Tracer-media interactions can give rise to transport phenomena beyond classical models; e.g., obstacle pushing can eliminate percolation. We demonstrate that the existing explanation of this effect fails in 3D. We show that confinement is governed by emergent trapping-rare door-closing events with constant probability per step-yielding exponential survival. This allows prediction of the time-dependent mean-squared displacement from short-time estimates of the diffusion constant and trapping probability, providing a minimal description of pushing-induced arrest across lattices and dimensions.