Anisotropic contact processes on homogeneous trees. (Q2574508)

The isotropic contact process on a homogeneous tree of degree \(d\geq 3\) is known to have three distinct phases: an extinction phase, a weak survival phase, and a strong survival phase. In the weak survival phase, the set of infected sites remains nonempty forever with positive probability, but with probability one every fixed site eventually becomes and remains healthy. By contrast, in the strong survival phase, the event that a fixed site is infected at arbitrary large time has positive probability. The purpose of the paper is to show that anisotropic but homogeneous, weakly symmetric contact processes on the tree have the weak survival phases as well. The contact process with infection rates \(\lambda _e\) and recovery rate \(\delta \) is a continuous-time Markov process whose state at any time \(t\) is a finite set of actually infected sites and whose evolution is governed by the following laws: 1) Infected sites recover at rate \(\delta >0\). 2) Healthy site \(x\) becomes infected at rate \(\sum _{e\in I_{t}(x)}\lambda _e\) where \(I_{t}(x)\) is the set of edges incident to \(x\) and some infected site. The contact process is said to be homogeneous if there is a homogeneous coloring of the edges: Each edge \(e\) is assigned a color \(\kappa (e)\) in such a way that for each color \(k\), the number \(q_k\) of edges of color \(k\) incident to vertex \(x\) is the same for all vertices \(x\). Now the infection rate \(\lambda _e = \lambda _{\kappa (e)}\) across edge \(e\) is a function only of the color of \(e\). The process is weakly symmetric if there is a color \(k\) with \(q_k \geq 2\). The main result of the paper says that for every homogeneous, weakly symmetric contact there exist critical values \(0<\delta _u < \delta _c < \infty \) such that \(\delta \geq \delta _c \Rightarrow \) extinction; \(\delta <\delta _u \Rightarrow \) strong survival; and \(\delta _u\leq \delta <\delta _c \Rightarrow \) weak survival.