Exponential extinction time of the contact process on finite graphs (Q271872)

The contact process on a graph is a Markov process on the graph with parameter \(\lambda\) modelling the spread of infection with an absorbing state (i.e., no infection). One of the main questions for contact processes on finite graphs is the extinction time \(\tau\), the random time at which there is no infection. It is known that for some families of graphs, such as finite hypercubes, \(\tau\) is (roughly) exponential in the number of vertices for \(\lambda\) above some critical value \(\lambda_c\). This is the phenomenon of metastability. The present paper shows that for trees with bounded degree and \(\lambda\) greater than the critical value for \(\mathbb{Z}\), metastability holds as the size of the trees gets large. A result similar in spirit is shown for graphs which contain a spanning tree with bounded degree. The latter result is applied to large random graphs whose vertex-degrees are power-law distributed and metastability is shown for any \(\lambda > 0\).