No Arabic abstract
We are interested in the spread of an epidemic between two communities that have higher connectivity within than between them. We model the two communities as independent Erdos-Renyi random graphs, each with n vertices and edge probability p = n^{a-1} (0<a<1), then add a small set of bridge edges, B, between the communities. We model the epidemic on this network as a contact process (Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible infection) with infection rate lambda and recovery rate 1. If nplambda = b > 1 then the contact process on the Erdos-Renyi random graph is supercritical, and we show that it survives for exponentially long. Further, let tau be the time to infect a positive fraction of vertices in the second community when the infection starts from a single vertex in the first community. We show that on the event that the contact process survives exponentially long, tau |B|/(np) converges in distribution to an exponential random variable with a specified rate. These results generalize to a graph with N communities.
We construct graphs (trees of bounded degree) on which the contact process has critical rate (which will be the same for both global and local survival) equal to any prescribed value between zero and $lambda_c(mathbb{Z})$, the critical rate of the one-dimensional contact process. We exhibit both graphs in which the process at this target critical value survives (locally) and graphs where it dies out (globally).
A little over 25 years ago Pemantle pioneered the study of the contact process on trees, and showed that on homogeneous trees the critical values $lambda_1$ and $lambda_2$ for global and local survival were different. He also considered trees with periodic degree sequences, and Galton-Watson trees. Here, we will consider periodic trees in which the number of children in successive generation is $(n,a_1,ldots, a_k)$ with $max_i a_i le Cn^{1-delta}$ and $log(a_1 cdots a_k)/log n to b$ as $ntoinfty$. We show that the critical value for local survival is asymptotically $sqrt{c (log n)/n}$ where $c=(k-b)/2$. This supports Pemantles claim that the critical value is largely determined by the maximum degree, but it also shows that the smaller degrees can make a significant contribution to the answer.
A little over 25 years ago Pemantle pioneered the study of the contact process on trees, and showed that the critical values $lambda_1$ and $lambda_2$ for global and local survival were different. Here, we will consider the case of trees in which the degrees of vertices are periodic. We will compute bounds on $lambda_1$ and $lambda_2$ and for the corresponding critical values $lambda_g$ and $lambda_ell$ for branching random walk. Much of what we find for period two $(a,b)$ trees was known to Pemantle. However, two significant new results give sharp asymptotics for the critical value $lambda_2$ of $(1,n)$ trees and generalize that result to the $(a_1,ldots, a_k, n)$ tree when $max_i a_i le n^{1-epsilon}$ and $a_1 cdots a_k = n^b$. We also give results for $lambda_g$ and $lambda_ell$ on $(a,b,c)$ trees. Since the values come from solving cubic equations, the explicit formulas are not pretty, but it is surprising that they depend only on $a+b+c$ and $abc$.
We analyze variants of the contact process that are built by modifying the percolative structure given by the graphical construction and develop a robust renormalization argument for proving extinction in such models. With this method, we obtain results on the phase diagram of two models: the Contact Process on Dynamic Edges introduced by Linker and Remenik and a generalization of the Renewal Contact Process introduced by Fontes, Marchetti, Mountford and Vares.
We consider a contact process on $Z^d$ with two species that interact in a symbiotic manner. Each site can either be vacant or occupied by individuals of species $A$ and/or $B$. Multiple occupancy by the same species at a single site is prohibited. The name symbiotic comes from the fact that if only one species is present at a site then that particle dies with rate 1 but if both species are present then the death rate is reduced to $mu le 1$ for each particle at that site. We show the critical birth rate $lambda_c(mu)$ for weak survival is of order $sqrt{mu}$ as $mu to 0$. Mean-field calculations predict that when $mu < 1/2$ there is a discontinuous transition as $lambda$ is varied. In contrast, we show that, in any dimension, the phase transition is continuous. To be fair to physicists the paper that introduced the model, the authors say that the symbiotic contact process is in the directed percolation universality class and hence has a continuous transition. However, a 2018 paper asserts that the transition is discontinuous above the upper critical dimension, which is 4 for oriented percolation.