Graduate Student / Postdoc Seminar

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The Contact Process

Speaker: Shirshendu Chatterjee

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Friday, November 1, 2013, 1 p.m.

Synopsis:

The contact process is one of the classical particle systems, which is used as one of the models for infection spreading. In this model, each vertex of a ground graph has two possible states: state 0 (healthy) and state 1 (infected). An infected vertex becomes healthy at rate one, in the sense that the distribution of infection period is exponentially distributed with mean 1. A healthy vertex become infected at rate lambda (the parameter of the model) times the number of its infected neighbors.

We will discuss some basic results for this process on lattices, trees and some large finite random graphs.