The use of the canonical approach in effective models of QCD

We clarify regions where the canonical approach works well at the finite temperature and density in the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (NJL) and Polyakov-NJL (PNJL) models. The canonical approach is a useful method for avoiding the sign problem in lattice QCD simulations at finite density, but it involves some parameters. We find that number densities computed from the canonical approach are consistent with exact values in most of the confinement phase within the parameters, which are applicable in lattice QCD.