Activity Phase Transition for Constrained Dynamics

We consider two cases of kinetically constrained models, namely East and FA-1f models. The object of interest of our work is the activity A(t){\mathcal {A}(t)} defined as the total number of configuration changes in the interval 0, t] for the dynamics on a finite domain. It has been shown in Garrahan et al. (J Phys A 42:075007, 2009; Phys Rev Lett 98:195702, 2007) that the large deviations of the activity exhibit a non-equilibrium phase transition in the thermodynamic limit and that reducing the activity is more likely than increasing it due to a blocking mechanism induced by the constraints. In this paper, we study the finite size effects around this first order phase transition and analyze the phase coexistence between the active and inactive dynamical phases in dimension 1. In higher dimensions, we show that the finite size effects are determined by the dimension and the choice of the boundary conditions.