English

Levy-flight spreading of epidemic processes leading to percolating clusters

Statistical Mechanics 2009-10-31 v1 q-bio

Abstract

We consider two stochastic processes, the Gribov process and the general epidemic process, that describe the spreading of an infectious disease. In contrast to the usually assumed case of short-range infections that lead, at the critical point, to directed and isotropic percolation respectively, we consider long-range infections with a probability distribution decaying in d dimensions with the distance as 1/R^{d+\sigma}. By means of Wilson's momentum shell renormalization-group recursion relations, the critical exponents characterizing the growing fractal clusters are calculated to first order in an \epsilon-expansion. It is shown that the long-range critical behavior changes continuously to its short-range counterpart for a decay exponent of the infection \sigma =\sigma_c>2.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/9807155,
  title  = {Levy-flight spreading of epidemic processes leading to percolating clusters},
  author = {H. K. Janssen and K. Oerding and F. van Wijland and H. J. Hilhorst},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/9807155},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

9 pages ReVTeX, 2 postscript figures included, submitted to Eur. Phys. J. B