Higher-order contagion processes in 3.99 dimensions

Higher-order interactions have recently emerged as a promising framework for describing new dynamical phenomena in heterogeneous contagion processes. However, a fundamental open question is how to understand their contribution from the perspective of the physics of critical phenomena. Based on a mesoscopic field-theoretic Langevin description, we show that: (i) pairwise mechanisms such as facilitation or thresholding are formally equivalent to higher-order ones, (ii) pairwise interactions at coarse-grained scales govern the higher-order contact process and, (iii) the interplay between noise and topology is determined by the network spectral dimension. In short, we demonstrate that classical field theories, rooted on model symmetries and/or network dimensionality, still capture the nature of the phase transition, also predicting finite-size effects in real and synthetic networks.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Unknown venue

• Publication date

  2025-02-25

• Fields of study

  Physics

• Identifiers
  arXiv 2502.18004
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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