Mean field limit for survival probability of the high-dimensional contact process

Abstract

In this paper we are concerned with the contact process on the squared lattice. The contact process intuitively describes the spread of the infectious disease on a graph, where an infectious vertex becomes healthy at a constant rate while a healthy vertex is infected at rate proportional to the number of infectious neighbors. As the dimension of the lattice grows to infinity, we give a mean field limit for the survival probability of the process conditioned on the event that only the origin of the lattice is infected at t=0. The binary contact path process is a main auxiliary tool for our proof.