The chiral phase transition and the role of vacuum fluctuations

Abstract: We investigate the chiral phase transition in the quark-meson effective model using optimised perturbation theory to one loop. Certain terms in the free energy are frequently omitted in calculations, on the assumption that their contribution is negligible. We show that this is not necessarily the case, and that the order of the phase transition, as well as the critical temperature, depends heavily on which contributions are included.