Phase Diagram of the Contact Process on Barabasi-Albert Networks

Abstract: We show results for the contact process on Barabasi networks. The contact process is a model for an epidemic spreading without permanent immunity that has an absorbing state. For finite lattices, the absorbing state is the true stationary state, which leads to the need for simulation of quasi-stationary states, which we did in two ways: reactivation by inserting spontaneous infected individuals, or by the quasi-stationary method, where we store a list of active states to continue the simulation when the system visits the absorbing state. The system presents an absorbing phase transition where the critical behavior obeys the Mean Field exponents $\beta=1$, $\gamma'=0$, and $\nu=2$. However, the different quasi-stationary states present distinct finite-size logarithmic corrections. We also report the critical thresholds of the model as a linear function of the network connectivity inverse $1/z$, and the extrapolation of the critical threshold function for $z \to \infty$ yields the basic reproduction number $R_0=1$ of the complete graph, as expected. Decreasing the network connectivity leads to the increase of the critical basic reproduction number $R_0$ for this model.