In the system we study, 1s and 0s represent occupied and vacant sites in the contact process with births at rate $lambda$ and deaths at rate 1. $-1$s are sterile individuals that do not reproduce but appear spontaneously on vacant sites at rate $alph
a$ and die at rate $thetaalpha$. We show that the system (which is attractive but has no dual) dies out at the critical value and has a nontrivial stationary distribution when it is supercritical. Our most interesting results concern the asymptotics when $alphato 0$. In this regime the process resembles the contact process in a random environment.
Thomas Milton Liggett was a world renowned UCLA probabilist, famous for his monograph Interacting Particle Systems. He passed away peacefully on May 12, 2020. This is a perspective article in memory of both Tom Liggett the person and Tom Liggett the mathematician.
There are a number of situations in which rescaled interacting particle systems have been shown to converge to a reaction diffusion equation (RDE) with a bistable reaction term. These RDEs have traveling wave solutions. When the speed of the wave is
nonzero, block constructions have been used to prove the existence or nonexistence of nontrivial stationary distributions. Here, we follow the approach in a paper by Etheridge, Freeman, and Pennington to show that in a wide variety of examples when the RDE limit has a bistable reaction term and traveling waves have speed 0, one can run time faster and further rescale space to obtain convergence to motion by mean curvature. This opens up the possibility of proving that the sexual reproduction model with fast stirring has a discontinuous phase transition, and that in Region 2 of the phase diagram for the nonlinear voter model studied by Molofsky et al there were two nontrivial stationary distributions.
The evoSIR model is a modification of the usual SIR process on a graph $G$ in which $S-I$ connections are broken at rate $rho$ and the $S$ connects to a randomly chosen vertex. The evoSI model is the same as evoSIR but recovery is impossible. In an u
ndergraduate project at Duke the critical value for evoSIR was computed and simulations showed that when $G$ is an ErdH os-Renyi graph with mean degree 5, the system has a discontinuous phase transition, i.e., as the infection rate $lambda$ decreases to $lambda_c$, the fraction of individuals infected during the epidemic does not converge to 0. In this paper we study evoSI dynamics on graphs generated by the configuration model. We show that there is a quantity $Delta$ determined by the first three moments of the degree distribution, so that the phase transition is discontinuous if $Delta>0$ and continuous if $Delta<0$.
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 pe
riodic 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.
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. T
he 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.
The key to our investigation is an improved (and in a sense sharp) understanding of the survival time of the contact process on star graphs. Using these results, we show that for the contact process on Galton-Watson trees, when the offspring distribu
tion (i) is subexponential the critical value for local survival $lambda_2=0$ and (ii) when it is geometric($p$) we have $lambda_2 le C_p$, where the $C_p$ are much smaller than previous estimates. We also study the critical value $lambda_c(n)$ for prolonged persistence on graphs with $n$ vertices generated by the configuration model. In the case of power law and stretched exponential distributions where it is known $lambda_c(n) to 0$ we give estimates on the rate of convergence. Physicists tell us that $lambda_c(n) sim 1/Lambda(n)$ where $Lambda(n)$ is the maximum eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix. Our results show that this is not correct.
In work with a variety of co-authors, Staver and Levin have argued that savannah and forest coexist as alternative stable states with discontinuous changes in density of trees at the boundary. Here we formulate a nonhomogeneous spatial model of the c
ompetition between forest and savannah. We prove that coexistence occurs for a time that is exponential in the size of the system, and that after an initial transient, boundaries between the alternative equilibria remain stable.
We study a competitive stochastic growth model called chase-escape in which red particles spread to adjacent uncolored sites and blue only to adjacent red sites. Red particles are killed when blue occupies the same site. If blue has rate-1 passage ti
mes and red rate-$lambda$, a phase transition occurs for the probability red escapes to infinity on $mathbb Z^d$, $d$-ary trees, and the ladder graph $mathbb Z times {0,1}$. The result on the tree was known, but we provide a new, simpler calculation of the critical value, and observe that it is a lower bound for a variety of graphs. We conclude by showing that red can be stochastically slower than blue, but still escape with positive probability for large enough $d$ on oriented $mathbb Z^d$ with passage times that resemble Bernoulli bond percolation.
In Poisson percolation each edge becomes open after an independent exponentially distributed time with rate that decreases in the distance from the origin. As a sequel to our work on the square lattice, we describe the limiting shape of the component
containing the origin in the oriented case. We show that the density of occupied sites at height $y$ in the cluster is close to the percolation probability in the corresponding homogeneous percolation process, and we study the fluctuations of the boundary.
