Renormalization theory of disordered contact processes with heavy-tailed dispersal

Motivated by long-range dispersal in ecological systems, we formulate and apply a general strong-disorder renormalization group (SDRG) framework to describe one-dimensional disordered contact processes with heavy tailed (such as power law, stretched exponential, and log-normal) dispersal kernels, widely used in ecology. The focus is on the close-to-critical scaling of the order parameters, including the commonly used density, as well as the less known persistence, which is nonzero in the inactive phase. Our analytic and numerical results obtained by SDRG schemes at different levels of approximation reveal that the more slowly decaying dispersal kernels lead to faster-vanishing densities as the critical point is approached. The persistence, however, shows an opposite tendency: the broadening of the dispersal makes its decline sharper at the critical point, becoming discontinuous for the extreme case of power-law dispersal. The SDRG schemes presented here also describe the quantum phase transition of random transverse-field Ising chains with ferromagnetic long-range interactions, the density corresponding to the magnetization of that model.