  We analyze the density and size dependence of the relaxation time for
kinetically constrained spin models (KCSM) intensively studied in the physical
literature as simple models sharing some of the features of a glass transition.
KCSM are interacting particle systems on $\Z^d$ with Glauber-like dynamics,
reversible w.r.t. a simple product i.i.d Bernoulli($p$) measure. The essential
feature of a KCSM is that the creation/destruction of a particle at a given
site can occur only if the current configuration of empty sites around it
satisfies certain constraints which completely define each specific model. No
other interaction is present in the model. From the mathematical point of view,
the basic issues concerning positivity of the spectral gap inside the
ergodicity region and its scaling with the particle density $p$ remained open
for most KCSM (with the notably exception of the East model in $d=1$
\cite{Aldous-Diaconis}). Here for the first time we: i) identify the ergodicity
region by establishing a connection with an associated bootstrap percolation
model; ii) develop a novel multi-scale approach which proves positivity of the
spectral gap in the whole ergodic region; iii) establish, sometimes optimal,
bounds on the behavior of the spectral gap near the boundary of the ergodicity
region and iv) establish pure exponential decay for the persistence function.
Our techniques are flexible enough to allow a variety of constraints and our
findings disprove certain conjectures which appeared in the physical literature
on the basis of numerical simulations.
