Information Transmission and Criticality in the Contact Process.

In the present paper, we study the relation between criticality and information transmission in the one-dimensional contact process with infection parameter $$\lambda .$$ We introduce a notion of sensitivity of the process to its initial condition and prove that it increases not only for values of $$\lambda < \lambda _c, $$ the value of the critical parameter, but keeps increasing even after $$ \lambda _c , $$ before finally starting to decrease for values of $$\lambda $$ sufficiently above $$\lambda _c.$$ This provides a counterexample to the common belief that associates maximal information transmission to criticality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]