Exponential decay for subcritical contact and percolation processes (Q1176360)

The contact process which is a stochastic model for the spread of disease amongst the members of a population distributed on \(Z^ d\) are studied. It is proved that the radius of the infected cluster has an exponentially decaying tail throughout the subcritical phase. This state is characterized by the condition \(\theta(\lambda,\delta)=0\) at \(\lambda/\delta<\rho_ c\). Here \(\lambda\) is the rate of neighbours infecting, \(\delta\) is the rate of disease cureing, \(\rho_ c\) is the critical value of the ratio \(\lambda/\delta\) and \(\theta\) is the probability that disease survives forever from a single initial infective population member. The same result is proved for space-time Lebesgue measure of the infected cluster.