Phase transitions for a planar quadratic contact process.pdf

Advances in Applied Mathematics 87 (2017) 82–107 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Advances in Applied Mathematics /locate/yaama Phase transitions for a planar quadratic contact process Mariya Bessonov a,?, Richard Durrett b a NYC College of Technology, Department of Mathematics, 300 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201, United States b Duke University, Department of Mathematics, Box 90320, Durham, NC 27708, United States article info Article history: Received 19 March 2014 Received in revised form 4 January 2017 Accepted 10 January 2017 Available online xxxx MSC: primary 60J10 secondary 92D25, 92D40 Keywords: Quadratic contact process Population dynamics Stationary distribution abstract We study a two dimensional version of Neuhauser’s long range sexual reproduction model and prove results that give bounds on the critical values λf for the process to survive from a ?nite set and λe for the existence of a nontrivial stationary distribution. Our ?rst result comes from a standard block construction, while the second involves a comparison with the “generic population model” of Bramson and Gray (1991) [3]. An interesting new feature of our work is the suggestion that, as in the one dimensional contact process, edge speeds characterize critical values. We are able to prove the following for our quadratic contact process when the range is large but suspect they are true for two dimensional ?nite range attractive particle systems that are symmetric with respect to re?ection in each axis. There is a speed c(θ) for the expansion of the process in each direction. If c(θ) 0 in all directions, then λ λf , while if at least one speed is positive, then λ λe. It is a challenging open problem to show that if some speed is negative, then the system dies out from any ?nite set. ? 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: mbessonov@ (M. Bessonov), rtd@ (R. Durrett). /10.1016/j.aam.2017.01.002 0196-8858/? 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserv