Lévy-flight spreading of epidemic processes leading to percolating clusters

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 . 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 -expansion. It is shown that the long-range critical behavior changes continuously to its short-range counterpart for a decay exponent of the infection .