Mass sensitivity of the three-flavor chiral phase transition

Abstract: The mass sensitivity of the chiral phase transition of QCD with and without axial $U_A(1)$-symmetry breaking at vanishing and finite quark chemical potential is investigated. To focus on the low-energy sector of QCD, a quark-meson model with three dynamical quark flavors is employed. Non-perturbative quantum fluctuations are taken into account with the functional renormalization group. The inherent ambiguities in fixing the low-energy model parameters away from the physical mass point and their consequences for spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking are discussed in detail and a heuristic parameter fixing scheme motivated by chiral perturbation theory is proposed. The influence of vacuum and thermal fluctuations of quarks and mesons on the order of the chiral phase transition is additionally assessed with a mean-field analysis.