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 $λ_c(\mathbb{Z})$, 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).
Random graphs have played an instrumental role in modelling real-world networks arising from the internet topology, social networks, or even protein-interaction networks within cells. Percolation, on the other hand, has been the fundamental model for understanding robustness and spread of epidemics on these networks. From a mathematical perspective, percolation is one of the simplest models that exhibits phase transition, and fascinating features are observed around the critical point. In this thesis, we prove limit theorems about structural properties of the connected components obtained from…
In this paper we give an improved upper bound for critical value $λ_c$ of the basic contact process on the lattice $\mathbb{Z}^d$ with $d\geq 3$. As a direct corollary of out result, \[ λ_c\leq 0.384. \] when $d=3$.
In this paper we are concerned with the two-stage contact process on the lattice $\mathbb{Z}^d$ introduced in \cite{Krone1999}. We gives a limit theorem of the critical infection rate of the process as the dimension $d$ of the lattice grows to infinity. A linear system and a two-stage SIR model are two main tools for the proof of our main result.
Bezuidenhout and Grimmett proved that the critical contact process dies out. Here, we generalize the result to the so called contact process in a random evolving environment (CPREE), introduced by Erik Broman. This process is a generalization of the contact process where the recovery rate can vary between two values. The rate which it chooses is determined by a background process, which evolves independently at different sites. As for the contact process, we can similarly define a critical value in terms of survival for this process. In this paper we prove that this definition is independent o…
In this paper we are concerned with contact processes on open clusters of oriented percolation in $Z^d$, where the disease spreads along the direction of open edges. We show that the two critical infection rates in the quenched and annealed cases are equal with probability one and are asymptotically equal to $(dp)^{-1}$ as the dimension $d$ grows to infinity, where $p$ is the probability of edge `open'.
We provide an explicit algorithm for sampling a uniform simple connected random graph with a given degree sequence. By products of this central result include: (i) continuum scaling limits of uniform simple connected graphs with given degree sequence and asymptotics for the number of simple connected graphs with given degree sequence under some regularity conditions, and (ii) scaling limits for the metric space structure of the maximal components in the critical regime of both the configuration model and the uniform simple random graph model with prescribed degree sequence under finite third m…
In the present paper, we study the relation between criticality and information transmission in the one-dimensional contact process with infection parameter $λ.$ To do this we define the {\it sensitivity} of the process to its initial condition. This sensitivity increases for values of $λ< λ_c, $ the value of the critical parameter. The main point of the present paper is that we show that actually it continues increasing even after $ λ_c $ and only starts decreasing for sufficiently large values of $λ.$ This provides a counterexample to the common belief that associates maximal information tra…
We study the behaviour of the contact process with rapid stirring on the lattice $\Z^d$ in dimensions $d\geq 3$. This process was studied earlier by Konno and Katori, who proved results for the speed of convergence of the critical value as the rate of stirring approaches infinity. %Katori has improved the result of Katori in $d\geq 3$ and has produced an interval where the critical value must lie. In this article we improve the results of Konno and Kattori and establish the sharp asymptotics of the critical value in dimensions $d\geq 3$.
In this paper we are concerned with contact processes with random edge weights on rooted regular trees. We assign i.i.d weights on each edge on the tree and assume that an infected vertex infects its healthy neighbor at rate proportional to the weight on the edge connecting them. Under the annealed measure, we define the critical value λ_c as the maximum of the infection rate with which the process will die out and define λ_e as the maximum of the infection rate with which the process dies out at exponential rate. We show that these two critical values satisfy an identical limit theorem and gi…
We consider the super-critical contact process on $\mathbb{Z}^d$. It is known that measures which dominate the upper invariant measure $μ$ converge exponentially fast to $μ$. However, the same is not true for measures which are below $μ$, as the time to infect a large empty region is related to its diameter. The result of this paper is the existence of a spectral gap in $L^2(μ)$, that is, the spectrum of the generator is empty inside an open strip $\{z\in\mathbb{C}: -λ<\Im(z)<0\}$ of the complex plane. This is equivalent to the fact that the variance of the semi-group of the contact process de…
Recent progress in the study of the contact process [2] has verified that the extinction-survival threshold $λ_1$ on a Galton-Watson tree is strictly positive if and only if the offspring distribution $ξ$ has an exponential tail. In this paper, we derive the first-order asymptotics of $λ_1$ for the contact process on Galton-Watson trees and its corresponding analog for random graphs. In particular, if $ξ$ is appropriately concentrated around its mean, we demonstrate that $λ_1(ξ) \sim 1/\mathbb{E} ξ$ as $\mathbb{E}ξ\rightarrow \infty$, which matches with the known asymptotics on the $d$-regular…
We introduce a method to prove metastability of the contact process on Erdős-Rényi graphs and on configuration model graphs. The method relies on uniformly bounding the total infection rate from below, over all sets with a fixed number of nodes. Once this bound is established, a simple comparison with a well chosen birth-and-death process will show the exponential growth of the extinction time. Our paper complements recent results on the metastability of the contact process: under a certain minimal edge density condition, we give explicit lower bounds on the infection rate needed to get metast…
We continue the study of renewal contact processes initiated in a companion paper, where we showed that if the tail of the interarrival distribution $μ$ is heavier than $t^{-α}$ for some $α<1$ (plus auxiliary regularity conditions) then the critical value vanishes. In this paper we show that if $μ$ has decreasing hazard rate and tail bounded by $t^{-α}$ with $α>1$, then the critical value is positive in the one-dimensional case. A more robust and much simpler argument shows that the critical value is positive in any dimension whenever the interarrival distribution has a finite second moment.
We consider the contact process on the model of hyperbolic random graph, in the regime when the degree distribution obeys a power law with exponent $χ\in(1,2)$ (so that the degree distribution has finite mean and infinite second moment). We show that the probability of non-extinction as the rate of infection goes to zero decays as a power law with an exponent that only depends on $χ$ and which is the same as in the configuration model, suggesting some universality of this critical exponent. We also consider finite versions of the hyperbolic graph and prove metastability results, as the size of…
We consider the critical spread-out contact process in Z^d with d\ge1, whose infection range is denoted by L\ge1. In this paper, we investigate the r-point function τ_{\vec t}^{(r)}(\vec x) for r\ge3, which is the probability that, for all i=1,...,r-1, the individual located at x_i\in Z^d is infected at time t_i by the individual at the origin o\in Z^d at time 0. Together with the results of the 2-point function in [van der Hofstad and Sakai, Electron. J. Probab. 9 (2004), 710-769; arXiv:math/0402049], on which our proofs crucially rely, we prove that the r-point functions converge to the mome…
Recently, Holmes and Perkins identified conditions which ensure that for a class of critical lattice models the scaling limit of the range is the range of super-Brownian motion. One of their conditions is an estimate on a spatial moment of order higher than four, which they verified for the sixth moment for spread-out lattice trees in dimensions $d>8$. Chen and Sakai have proved the required moment estimate for spread-out critical oriented percolation in dimensions $d+1>4+1$. We prove estimates on all moments for the spread-out critical contact process in dimensions $d>4$, which in particular …
