On the critical behavior of the contact process in deterministic inhomogeneous environments (Q1345595)

The contact process with inhomogeneous death rates is a continuous-time Markov process on the state space \(\{0,1\}^{Z^ d}\), whose evolution is governed by the following rules: A 1 at site \(x \in Z^ d\) flips to 0 at rate \(\delta (x) > 0\); a 0 at site \(x\) flips to 1 at rate \(\lambda\) times the number of nearest neighbors of \(x\) which are in state 1. Starting from the configuration identically 1, the process converges in distribution to an invariant measure \(\nu\) (say). Let \(\delta_ 0\) denote the (invariant) measure concentrated on the configuration identically 0, and define the critical point by \(\lambda_ c = \inf \{\lambda > 0 : \delta_ 0 \neq \nu\}\). Let \(\rho_ \lambda (x) = \nu \{\eta : \eta (x) = 1\}\). It has been shown by \textit{C. Bezuidenhout} and \textit{G. Grimmett} [ibid. 18, No. 4, 1462-1482 (1990; Zbl 0718.60109)] that, in the homogeneous case, \(\rho_{\lambda_ c} (0) = 0\) in any dimension. In contrast to this the authors of the present paper show that there are inhomogeneous contact processes for which \(\rho_{\lambda_ c} (0) > 0\). Let \(S\) be some set of sites and let \(\delta (x) = 1\), \(x \not \in S\), and \(\delta (x) = b \in ]0,1[\), \(x \in S\). Let \(\lambda_ c (S)\) denote the critical point of such a system (then \(\lambda_ c (\emptyset)\) corresponds to the critical point in the homogeneous case). It is shown that \(\lambda_ c (S) < \lambda_ c (\emptyset)\) if \(S\) is ``sufficiently dense'' and \(\lambda_ c (S) = \lambda_ c (\emptyset)\) if \(S\) is ``sufficiently thin''.