We explore the influence of the current quark mass on observables in the low energy regime of hadronic interactions within a renormalization group analysis of the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model in its bosonized form. We derive current quark mass expansions
for the pion decay constant and the pion mass, and we recover analytically the universal logarithmic dependence. A numerical solution of the renormalization group flow equations enables us to determine effective low energy constants from the model. We find values consistent with the phenomenological estimates used in chiral perturbation theory.
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 mo
del, 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.
