Regensburg 2013 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 19: Focus Session: Dynamics of Adaptive Networks (joint session BP/DY/SOE)
DY 19.4: Talk
Wednesday, March 13, 2013, 10:30–10:45, H37
Absence of epidemic thresholds in a growing adaptive network — •Güven Demirel1 and Thilo Gross2 — 1Max-Planck-Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany — 2University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom
In epidemics on network, a central role is played by the degree distribution, i.e. the distribution of the number of neighbors of nodes. In particular in scale-free networks, where the variance of the degree distribution diverges, no epidemic thresholds exist, such that even diseases with arbitrary low infectiousness can percolate. By contrast, in networks where the variance of the degree distribution is finite, diseases generally need to surpass a threshold infectiousness to persist. In the real world the degree distribution is not independent of epidemics, but is shaped through disease induced behavioral changes and mortality in a complex interplay. Here, we consider the growth of a network from which nodes are simultaneously removed due to disease-induced mortality. We show analytically and numerically that in this system no epidemic thresholds exists, although the interplay between network growth and epidemic spreading leads to networks in which the degree distribution has a finite variance.