The Contact Process on a Homogeneous Tree

Abstract

What is in this chapter? The contact process has the same birth and death rates as a particular branching Markov chain for which births occur only on nearest neighbor sites. The difference between the two models is that there is at most one particle per site for the contact process while there is no bound in the number of particles per site for branching Markov chains. So, branching Markov chains and the contact process may be thought of as two extreme points in the same class of models.