Two-scale multitype contact process: coexistence in spatially explicit metapopulations

Abstract

It is known that the limiting behavior of the contact process strongly depends upon the geometry of the graph on which particles evolve: while the contact process on the regular lattice exhibits only two phases, the process on homogeneous trees exhibits an intermediate phase of weak survival. Similarly, we prove that the geometry of the graph can drastically affect the limiting behavior of multitype versions of the contact process. Namely, while it is strongly believed (and partly proved) that the coexistence region of the multitype contact process on the regular lattice reduces to a subset of the phase diagram with Lebesgue measure zero, we prove that the coexistence region of the process on a graph including two levels of interaction has a positive Lebesgue measure. The relevance of this multiscale spatial stochastic process as a model of disease dynamics is also discussed.