Impact of non-zero strangeness on thermodynamics of finite volume quark matter

Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of strangeness chemical potential and finite volume on QCD critical end point by employing a (2+1) flavored Polyakov quark meson model. Within the mean-field approximation, the model has been extended to study the effect of vector interactions on the thermodynamics of isospin-asymmetric quark matter. Susceptibilities of conserved charges like the quark and strangeness number are analyzed using Taylor's series expansion. The chiral phase transition boundary in the QCD phase diagram is found to be shifted towards higher values of the quark chemical potential ($\mu_q$) and lower temperature (T) for decreasing system size. On the other hand, there is an opposite change to lower quark chemical potential and higher temperature for decreasing strangeness chemical potential.