Slow, bursty dynamics as the consequence of quenched network topologies

Abstract: Bursty dynamics of agents is shown to appear at criticality or in extended Griffiths phases, even in case of Poisson processes. I provide numerical evidence for power-law type of inter-communication time distributions by simulating the Contact Process and the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible model. This observation suggests that in case of non-stationary bursty systems the observed non-poissonian behavior can emerge as the consequence of an underlying hidden poissonian network process, which is either critical or exhibits strong rare-region effects. On contrary, in time varying networks rare-region effects do not cause deviation from the mean-field behavior and heterogeneity induced burstyness is absent.