The contact process with fast voting

Abstract

Consider a combination of the contact process and the voter model in which deaths occur at rate 1 per site, and across each edge between nearest neighbors births occur at rate $\lambda$ and voting events occur at rate $\theta$. We are interested in the asymptotics as $\theta \to\infty$ of the critical value $\lambda_c(\theta)$ for the existence of a nontrivial stationary distribution. In $d \ge 3$, $\lambda_c(\theta) \to 1/(2d\rho_d)$ where $\rho_d$ is the probability a $d$ dimensional simple random walk does not return to its starting point.In $d=2$, $\lambda_c(\theta)/\log(\theta) \to 1/4\pi$, while in $d=1$, $\lambda_c(\theta)/\theta^{1/2}$ has $\liminf \ge 1/\sqrt{2}$ and $\limsup < \infty$.The lower bound might be the right answer, but proving this, or even getting a reasonable upper bound, seems to be a difficult problem.