Speaker
Description
Using a $(2+1)$-flavor Nambu--Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model, we study the effects of the strangeness chemical potential ($\mu_{S}$) and vector interactions on the chiral crossover lines, which we then use to examine flavor mixing within this framework. With the curvature coefficients, $\kappa_{2}$'s, showing excellent agreement with available lattice QCD (LQCD) findings, we estimate the permissible strength of various types of vector interactions. A key finding is that $\kappa_{2}^{B}$ exhibits a nontrivial decreasing trend with increasing $\mu_{S}$, eventually becoming negative at sufficiently high $\mu_{S}$. This behavior strongly depends on flavor mixing due to the $U(1)_A$-breaking 't Hooft interaction and vector interaction. We propose this unique trend as a valuable metric for quantifying flavor mixing in both NJL-like models and QCD, advocating for further exploration of this effect in LQCD.
