The contact process with aging

Abstract

In this article, we introduce a contact process with aging: in this generalization of the classical contact process, each particle has an integer age that influences its ability to give birth. We prove here a shape theorem for this process conditioned to survive. In order to establish some key exponential decays, we adapt the Bezuidenhout and Grimmett construction [BG91] to build a coupling between our process and a supercritical oriented percolation. Our results also apply to the two-stage contact process introduced by Krone [Kro92].