Volume and quark mass dependence of the chiral phase transition

Abstract

We investigate chiral symmetry restoration in finite spatial volume and at finite temperature by calculating the dependence of the chiral phase transition temperature on the size of the spatial volume and the current-quark mass for the quark-meson model, using the proper-time Renormalization Group approach. We find that the critical temperature is weakly dependent on the size of the spatial volume for large current-quark masses, but depends strongly on it for small current-quark masses. In addition, for small volumes we observe a dependence on the choice of quark boundary conditions.