# Quark mass effects in the thermodynamical properties of an extended (P)NJL model

## TL;DR

This paper investigates the thermodynamics of strongly interacting particles using an extended Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model that includes additional quark interactions and chiral symmetry breaking terms, comparing results with lattice QCD data.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel extension of the PNJL model with non-canonical terms and compares its predictions to lattice QCD, showing improved agreement.

## Key findings

- Model aligns well with lattice QCD data.
- Inclusion of non-canonical terms enhances thermodynamic predictions.
- Extended model captures quark mass effects more accurately.

## Abstract

We analyze the thermodynamical properties of a system of strongly interacting particles at vanishing quark chemical potential in the framework of a recently developed extension of the Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio Model. In addition to eight quark interactions terms, non-canonical terms which explicitly break chiral symmetry up to the same order in a $1/N_c$ expansion ($N_c$ number of colors) are included. A recently proposed Polyakov potential is considered and the results are compared to lattice QCD data resulting in a favorable scenario for the recent model variants.