Metastable densities for the contact process on power law random graphs

Abstract

We consider the contact process on a random graph with fixed degree distribution given by a power law. We follow the work of Chatterjee and Durrett (2009), who showed that for arbitrarily small infection parameter $\lambda$, the survival time of the process is larger than a stretched exponential function of the number of vertices, $n$. We obtain sharp bounds for the typical density of infected sites in the graph, as $\lambda$ is kept fixed and $n$ tends to infinity. We exhibit three different regimes for this density, depending on the tail of the degree law.