In this talk attention is drawn to thermal properties due to the addition of eight quark interactions in the standard $SU(3)times SU(3)$ chiral Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model (NJL) with t Hooft interaction (NJLH). The schematic SU(3) flavor limit with massless current quarks as well as the realistic case $m_u=m_d e m_s$ are discussed.
The influence of a constant magnetic field on the order parameter of the four-dimensional Nambu and Jona-Lasinio model extended by the t Hooft six-quark term and eight-quark interactions is considered. It is shown that the multi-quark interactions ca
use the order parameter to increase sharply (secondary magnetic catalysis) with increasing strength of the field at the characteristic scale $Hsim 10^{14}Lambda^2$ G/MeV^2.
This work is a follow-up of our recent observation that in the SU(3) flavor limit with vanishing current quark masses the temperature for the chiral transition is substantially reduced by adding eight-quark interactions to the Nambu - Jona-Lasinio La
grangian with U_A(1) breaking. Here we generalize the case to realistic light and strange quark masses and confirm our prior result. Additionally, we demonstrate that depending on the strength of OZI violating eight-quark interactions, the system undergoes either a rapid crossover or a first order phase transition. The meson mass spectra of the low lying pseudoscalars and scalars at T=0 are not sensitive to the difference in the parameter settings that correspond to these two alternatives, except for the singlet-octet mixing scalar channels, mainly the sigma meson.
A NJL Lagrangian extended to six and eight quark interactions is applied to study temperature effects (SU(3) flavor limit, massless case), and (realistic massive case). The transition temperature can be considerably reduced as compared to the standar
d approach, in accordance with recent lattice calculations. The mesonic spectra built on the spontaneously broken vacuum induced by the t Hooft interaction strength, as opposed to the commonly considered case driven by the four-quark coupling, undergoes a rapid crossover to the unbroken phase, with a slope and at a temperature which is regulated by the strength of the OZI violating eight-quark interactions. This strength can be adjusted in consonance with the four-quark coupling and leaves the spectra unchanged, except for the sigma meson mass, which decreases. A first order transition behavior is also a possible solution within the present approach.
The thermodynamic potential and thermal dependence of low lying mass spectra of scalars and pseudoscalars are evaluated in a generalized Nambu -- Jona-Lasinio model, which incorporates eight-quark interactions. These are necessary to stabilize the sc
alar effective potential for the light and strange quark flavors, which would be otherwise unbounded from below. In addition it turns out that they are also crucial to i) lower the temperature of the chiral transition, in conformity with lattice calculations, ii) sharpen the temperature interval in which the crossover occurs, iii) or even allow for first order transitions to occur with realistic quark mass values, from certain critical values of the parameters. These are unprecedented results which cannot be obtained within the NJL approaches restricted to quartic and six-quark interactions.
We present the phase diagram and the fluctuations of different conserved charges like quark number, charge and strangeness at vanishing chemical potential for the 2+1 flavor Polyakov Loop extended Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model with eight-quark interactio
n terms using three-momentum cutoff regularisation. The main effect of the higher order interaction term is to shift the critical end point to the lower value of the chemical potential and higher value of the temperature. The fluctuations show good qualitative agreement with the lattice data.