Interplay between percolation and glassiness in the random Lorentz gas.

The random Lorentz gas (RLG) is a minimal model of transport in heterogeneous media. It also models the dynamics of a tracer in a glassy system. These two perspectives, however, are fundamentally inconsistent. Arrest in the former is related to percolation, and hence continuous, while glass-like arrest is discontinuous. In order to clarify the interplay between percolation and glassiness in the RLG, we consider its exact solution in the infinite-dimensional $d\rightarrow\infty$ limit, as well as numerics in $d=2\ldots 20$. We find that the mean field solutions of the RLG and glasses fall in the same universality class, and that instantonic corrections related to rare cage escapes destroy the glass transition in finite dimensions. This advance suggests that the RLG can be used as a toy model to develop a first-principle description of hopping in structural glasses.