Revisiting the Phase Structure of the Polyakov-quark-meson Model in the presence of Vacuum Fermion Fluctuation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how including fermionic vacuum fluctuations in the Polyakov-quark-meson model affects its phase diagram and thermodynamic properties, revealing significant shifts in critical points and smoother transition behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces the PQMVT model incorporating fermionic vacuum effects and compares its phase structure with the traditional PQM model, highlighting the impact of vacuum fluctuations.

Findings

Critical end point shifts from near the temperature axis to higher chemical potential.

Fermionic vacuum term causes smoother temperature variations of thermodynamic quantities.

The crossover transition becomes softer and more gradual with vacuum fluctuations.

Abstract

We have considered the contribution of fermionic vacuum loop in the effective potential of Polyakov loop extended Quark Meson Model (PQM) for the two quark flavour case and explored the phase structure and thermodynamics of the resulting PQMVT model (Polyakov Quark Meson Model with Vacuum Term) in detail at non zero as well as zero chemical potential. The temperature variations of order parameters and their derivatives have been calculated and the phase diagram together with the location of critical end point (CEP) has been obtained in $\mu$, and $T$ plane in both the models PQMVT and PQM. The PQMVT model analysis has been compared with the calculations in PQM model in order to bring out the effect of fermionic vacuum term on the physical observables. We notice that the critical end point (CEP) which is located near the temperature axis at ($\mu=81.0$, $T = 167$ MeV) in the PQM model gets shifted close to the chemical potential axis at ($\mu_{CEP}=294.7$, $T_{CEP}=84.0$ MeV) in the PQMVT model calculations of the phase diagram. Since it emerges from a background of second order transition in the chiral limit of massless quarks, the crossover occurring at $\mu$ = 0 in PQMVT model for the realistic case of explicitly broken chiral symmetry, has been identified as quite a soft and smooth transition. We have presented and compared the results for temperature variations of thermodynamic observables at zero and different non-zero quark chemical potentials. It is noticed that the presence of fermionic vacuum term in the effective potential leads to a smoother and slower temperature variation of thermodynamic quantities.