English

A phase transition for a spatial host-parasite model with extreme host immunities on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ and $\mathbb{T}_d$

Probability 2026-01-27 v3

Abstract

We investigate a model of a parasite population invading spatially distributed immobile hosts on a graph, which is a modification of the frog model. Each host has an unbreakable immunity against infection with a certain probability 1p1-p and parasites move as simple symmetric random walks attempting to infect any host they encounter and subsequently reproduce themselves. We show that, on Zd\mathbb{Z}^d with d2d\ge 2 and the dd-regular tree Td\mathbb{T}_d with d3d\ge 3, the survival probability of parasites exhibits a phase transition at a critical value of pc(0,1)p_c\in(0,1). Also, we show that adding vertices and edges to the underlying graph can, in general, both increase or decrease the value of pcp_c. Finally, we show that on quasi-vertex-transitive graphs, with probability 11, a fixed vertex is only visited finitely often by a parasite under mild assumptions on the offspring distribution of parasites.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.08596,
  title  = {A phase transition for a spatial host-parasite model with extreme host immunities on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ and $\mathbb{T}_d$},
  author = {Sascha Franck},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.08596},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

20 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:41:59.903Z