QCD Thermodynamics: Confronting the Polyakov-Quark-Meson Model with Lattice QCD

NJL-type effective models represent a low-energy realization of QCD and incorporate pertinent aspects such as chiral symmetry and its spontaneous breaking, the center symmetry in the heavy-quark limit as well as the axial anomaly. One such model, the Polyakov-quark-meson model for three light quark flavors, is introduced in order to study the phase structure of strongly-interacting matter. With recent high-statistics lattice QCD simulations of the finite-temperature equation of state, a detailed comparison with model results becomes accessible. Such comparisons allow to estimate volume and truncation effects of quantities, obtained on the lattice and provide possible lattice extrapolation procedures to finite chemical potential which are important to locate a critical endpoint in the QCD phase diagram. (authors)