Splitting of the universality class of anomalous transport in crowded media

Abstract

We investigate the emergence of subdiffusive transport by obstruction in continuum models for molecular crowding. While the underlying percolation transition for the accessible space displays universal behavior, the dynamic properties depend in a subtle non-universal way on the transport through narrow channels. At the same time, the different universality classes are robust with respect to introducing correlations in the obstacle matrix as we demonstrate for quenched hard-sphere liquids as underlying structures. Our results confirm that the microscopic dynamics can dominate the relaxational behavior even at long times, in striking contrast to glassy dynamics.