Kinetically Constrained Lattice Gases

Kinetically constrained lattice gases (KCLG) are interacting particle systems which show some of the key features of the liquid/glass transition and, more generally, of glassy dynamics. Their distintictive signature is the following: i) reversibility w.r.t. product i.i.d. Bernoulli measure at any particle density and ii) vanishing of the exchange rate across any edge unless the particle configuration around the edge satisfies a proper constraint besides hard core. Because of degeneracy of the exchange rates the models can show anomalous time decay in the relaxation process w.r.t. the usual high temperature lattice gas models particularly in the so-called cooperative case, when the vacancies have to collectively cooperate in order for the particles to move through the systems. Here we focus on the Kob-Andersen (KA) model, a cooperative example widely analyzed in the physics literature, both in a finite box with particle reservoirs at the boundary and on the infinite lattice. In two dimensions (but our techniques extend to any dimension) we prove a diffusive scaling O(L (2)) (apart from logarithmic corrections) of the relaxation time in a finite box of linear size L. We then use the above result to prove a diffusive decay 1/t (again apart from logarithmic corrections) of the density-density time autocorrelation function at any particle density, a result that has been sometimes questioned on the basis of numerical simulations. The techniques that we devise, based on a novel combination of renormalization and comparison with a long-range Glauber type constrained model, are robust enough to easily cover other choices of the kinetic constraints.