Abstract

Reaction–diffusion processes1 have been widely used to study dynamical processes in epidemics and ecology5 in networked metapopulations. In the context of epidemics, reaction processes are understood as contagions within each subpopulation (patch), while diffusion represents the mobility of individuals between patches. Recently, the characteristics of human mobility, such as its recurrent nature, have been proven crucial to understand the phase transition to endemic epidemic states. Here, by developing a framework able to cope with the elementary epidemic processes, the spatial distribution of populations and the commuting mobility patterns, we discover three different critical regimes of the epidemic incidence as a function of these parameters. Interestingly, we reveal a regime of the reaction–diffussion process in which, counter-intuitively, mobility is detrimental to the spread of disease. We analytically determine the precise conditions for the emergence of any of the three possible critical regimes in real and synthetic networks.

Biography

Alex Arenas is Full Professor at the Departament d’Enginyeria Informàtica i Matemàtiques (DEIM) of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili. He obtained his PhD in Physics in 1996. In 1995, he got a tenure position at DEIM, and in 1997 he became associate professor at the same department. In 2000, he was visiting scholar at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. (LBL) in the Applied Mathematics group of Prof. Alexandre Chorin (University of California, Berkeley). After this visit, he started a collaboration with Berkeley, and in 2007 he became visiting researcher of LBL. Arenas has written more than 175 interdisciplinary publications in major peer reviewed including Nature, Nature Physics, PNAS, Physics Reports and Physical Review Letters, which have received more than 9000 citations. He is one of the few Europeans serving as Associate Editors of one of the most important publication in physics worldwide, the American Physical Society journal, Physical Review E.