Constraint relaxation leads to jamming

Abstract: Adding transitions to an equilibrium system increases the activity. Naively, one would expect this to hold also in out of equilibrium systems. This surprising effect is caused by adding heretofore forbidden transitions into less and less active states. We demonstrate, using relatively simple models, how adding transitions to an out of equilibrium system may in fact reduce the activity and even cause it to vanish. We investigate six related kinetically-constrained lattice gas models, some of which behave as naively expected while others exhibit this non-intuitive behavior. We introduce a semi-mean-field approximation describing the models, which agrees qualitatively with our numerical simulation.