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.
@article{arxiv.2603.04048,
title = {Pushing-Induced Arrest Across Lattices and Dimensions},
author = {I. Shitrit and O. lauber Bonomo and S. Reuveni},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.04048},
year = {2026}
}