Spatial epidemics and local times for critical branching random walks in dimensions 2 and 3 (Q707605)

The main aim of the paper under review is to show that spatial susceptible/infected/recovered epidemics (SIR) in dimensions two and three exhibit critical thresholds as in the well-known one-dimensional case. The main result of the authors states that under suitable hypotheses on the initial configurations of the infected individuals, the critical spatial SIR-\(d\) epidemic for both \(d=2,3\) can be rescaled so as to converge to a Dawson-Watanabe measure-valued diffusion process (or often called super Brownian motion). Depending on the size of the initially infected set, the limiting Dawson-Watanabe measure-valued diffusion process has either a positive location-dependent killing rate or no killing at all. A similar result for dimension \(d=1\) was proved by the first author of this paper [Spatial epidemics: critical behavior in one dimension. Probab. Theory Relat. Fields 144, No. 3-4, 429--469 (2009; Zbl 1181.92073)].