A search for inverse magnetic catalysis in thermal quark-meson models

Abstract

We explore the parameter space of the two-flavor thermal quark-meson model and its Polyakov loop-extended version under the influence of a constant external magnetic field $B$. We investigate the behavior of the pseudo critical temperature for chiral symmetry breaking taking into account the likely dependence of two parameters on the magnetic field: the Yukawa quark-meson coupling and the parameter $T_0$ of the Polyakov loop potential. Under the constraints that magnetic catalysis is realized at zero temperature and the chiral transition at $B=0$ is a crossover, we find that the quark-meson model leads to thermal magnetic catalysis for the whole allowed parameter space, in contrast to the present picture stemming from lattice QCD.