Multicritical Infection Spreading

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Luzzatto, Leone V., López, Juan Felipe Barrera, Kovács, István A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Luzzatto, Leone V.
López, Juan Felipe Barrera
Kovács, István A.
author_facet Luzzatto, Leone V.
López, Juan Felipe Barrera
Kovács, István A.
contents The contact process is a simple infection spreading model showcasing an out-of-equilibrium phase transition between a macroscopically active and an inactive phase. Such absorbing state phase transitions are often sensitive to the presence of quenched disorder. Traditionally, a phase transition in the disordered contact process is either triggered by dilution or by locally varying the infection rate. However, when both factors play an important role, a multicritical point emerges that remains poorly understood. Here, we study the multicritical contact process by large-scale Monte Carlo simulations in two and three dimensions. The multicritical behavior is found to be universal and exhibits ultra-slow, activated dynamical scaling, with exponents consistent with those predicted by the strong disorder renormalization group method. This finding indicates that the multicritical contact process belongs to the same universality class as the multicritical quantum Ising model, opening future directions to measure quantum entanglement properties via classical simulations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_20895
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multicritical Infection Spreading
Luzzatto, Leone V.
López, Juan Felipe Barrera
Kovács, István A.
Statistical Mechanics
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Biological Physics
Populations and Evolution
The contact process is a simple infection spreading model showcasing an out-of-equilibrium phase transition between a macroscopically active and an inactive phase. Such absorbing state phase transitions are often sensitive to the presence of quenched disorder. Traditionally, a phase transition in the disordered contact process is either triggered by dilution or by locally varying the infection rate. However, when both factors play an important role, a multicritical point emerges that remains poorly understood. Here, we study the multicritical contact process by large-scale Monte Carlo simulations in two and three dimensions. The multicritical behavior is found to be universal and exhibits ultra-slow, activated dynamical scaling, with exponents consistent with those predicted by the strong disorder renormalization group method. This finding indicates that the multicritical contact process belongs to the same universality class as the multicritical quantum Ising model, opening future directions to measure quantum entanglement properties via classical simulations.
title Multicritical Infection Spreading
topic Statistical Mechanics
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Biological Physics
Populations and Evolution
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20895