Influence of quark masses on the QCD phase diagram in the presence of a magnetic field

TL;DR

This paper investigates how quark masses affect the QCD phase diagram under strong magnetic fields, demonstrating that qualitative behavior remains consistent despite quantitative sensitivities, addressing discrepancies in lattice simulation results.

Contribution

It shows that quark mass variations do not alter the qualitative behavior of the QCD phase diagram in magnetic fields within the Polyakov-Quark-Meson model.

Findings

Qualitative behavior of the critical temperature remains unchanged with different quark masses.

Quantitative results are sensitive to quark mass variations.

Addresses discrepancies between different lattice simulation results.

Abstract

The most recent lattice results on the QCD phase diagram in the presence of a strong magnetic field strongly disagree with results from previous lattice simulations and several model calculations. The most remarkable difference is the qualitative behavior of the critical temperature as a function of the magnetic field intensity, which in later results are shown to decrease in opposition to what was found previously. According to the authors, such a discrepancy in lattice simulations could be due to different lattice spacing, or different number of flavors and quark masses. We investigate the influence of quark masses on the Polyakov- Quark-Meson model and show that, although quantitatively the results are sensitive to those parameters, the qualitative behavior remains the same.