Mean-Field Critical Behavior for the Contact Process

The contact process is a model of spread of an infectious disease. Combining with the result of ref. 1, we prove that the critical exponents take on the mean-field values for sufficiently high dimensional nearest-neighbor models and for sufficiently spread-out models with d>4:()– _c as _c and ()( _c–)^–1 as _c, where () and () are the spread probability and the susceptibility of the infection respectively, and _c is the critical infection rate. Our results imply that the upper critical dimension for the contact process is at most 4.