Criticality of a contact process with coupled diffusive and nondiffusive fields

We investigate the critical behavior of a model with two coupled critical densities, one of which is diffusive. The model simulates the propagation of an epidemic process in a population, which uses the underlying lattice to leave a track of the recent disease history. We determine the critical density of the population above which the system reaches an active stationary state with a finite density of active particles. We also perform a scaling analysis to determine the order parameter, the correlation length, and critical relaxation exponents. We show that the model does not belong to the usual directed percolation universality class and is compatible with the class of directed percolation with diffusive and conserved fields.