Generalized epidemic process and tricritical dynamic percolation -: art. no. 026114

The renowned general epidemic process describes the stochastic evolution of a population of individuals which are either susceptible, infected, or dead. A second order phase transition belonging to the universality class of dynamic isotropic percolation lies between the endemic and pandemic behavior of the process. We generalize the general epidemic process by introducing a fourth kind of individuals, viz., individuals which are weakened by the process but not yet infected. This weakening gives rise to a mechanism that introduces a global instability in the spreading of the process and therefore opens the possibility of a discontinuous transition in addition to the usual continuous percolation transition. The tricritical point separating the lines of first and second order transitions constitutes an independent universality class, namely, the universality class of tricritical dynamic isotropic percolation. Using renormalized field theory we work out a detailed scaling description of this universality class. We calculate the scaling exponents in an epsilon expansion below the upper critical dimension d(c)=5 for various observables describing tricritical percolation clusters and their spreading properties. In a remarkable contrast to the usual percolation transition, the exponents beta and beta(') governing the two order parameters, viz., the mean density and the percolation probability, turn out to be different at the tricritical point. In addition to the scaling exponents we calculate for all our static and dynamic observables logarithmic corrections to the mean-field scaling behavior at d(c)=5.