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

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.