We study the critical effect of quarantine on the propagation of epidemics on an adaptive network of social contacts. For this purpose, we analyze the susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model in the presence of quarantine, where susceptible individuals protect themselves by disconnecting their links to infected neighbors with probability w, and reconnecting them to other susceptible individuals chosen at random. Starting from a single infected individual, we show by an analytical approach and simulations that there is a phase transition at a critical rewiring (quarantine) threshold w c separating a phase (w < w c ) where the disease reaches a large fraction of the population, from a phase (w ≥ w c ) where the disease does not spread out. We find that in our model the topology of the network strongly affects the size of the propagation, and that w c increases with the mean degree and heterogeneity of the network. We also find that w c is reduced if we perform a preferential rewiring, in which the rewiring probability is proportional to the degree of infected nodes.

We propose numerical methods to evaluate the upper critical dimension d(c) of random percolation clusters in Erdös-Rényi networks and in scale-free networks with degree distribution P(k) approximately k(-lambda), where k is the degree of a node and lambda is the broadness of the degree distribution. Our results support the theoretical prediction, d(c) = 2(lambda - 1)(lambda - 3) for scale-free networks with 3 < lambda < 4 and d(c) = 6 for Erdös-Rényi networks and scale-free networks with lambda > 4 . When the removal of nodes is not random but targeted on removing the highest degree nodes we obtain d(c) = 6 for all lambda > 2 . Our method also yields a better numerical evaluation of the critical percolation threshold p(c) for scale-free networks. Our results suggest that the finite size effects increases when lambda approaches 3 from above.

We study the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model in complex networks, considering that not all individuals in the population interact in the same way between them. This heterogeneity between contacts is modeled by a continuous disorder. In our model the disorder represents the contact time or the closeness between individuals. We find that the duration time of an epidemic has a crossover with the system size, from a power law regime to a logarithmic regime depending on the transmissibility related to the strength of the disorder. Using percolation theory, we find that the duration of the epidemic scales as the average length of the branches of the infection. Our theoretical findings, supported by simulations, explains the crossover between the two regimes.