Unifying the Percolation and Mean-field Descriptions of the Random Lorentz Gas

The random Lorentz gas (RLG) is a minimal model of both transport in heterogenous media and structural glasses. Yet these two perspectives are fundamentally inconsistent, as the dynamical arrest is continuous in the former and discontinuous in the latter. This hinders our understanding of either, as well as of the RLG itself. By considering an exact solution of the RLG in the infinite-dimensional $d\rightarrow\infty$ limit as well as numerics in $d=2\ldots 20$ we here resolve this paradox. Our results reveal the importance of instantonic corrections, related to rare cage escapes, in unifying glass and percolation physics. This advance suggests a starting point for a first-principle description of hopping processes in structural glasses.