QCD Thermodynamics: Confronting the Polyakov-Quark-Meson Model with Lattice QCD

Understand

NJL-type effective models represent a low-energy realization of QCD and incorporate pertinent aspects such as chiral symmetry and its spontaneous breaking, the center symmetry in the heavy-quark limit as well as the axial anomaly.

• One such model, the Polyakov-quark-meson model for three light quark flavors, is introduced in order to study the phase structure of strongly-interacting matter.
• With recent high-statistics lattice QCD simulations of the finite-temperature equation of state, a detailed comparison with model results becomes accessible.
• Such comparisons allow to estimate volume and truncation effects of quantities, obtained on the lattice and provide possible lattice extrapolation procedures to finite chemical potential which are important to locate a critical endpoint in the QCD phase diagram.