Inverse Magnetic Catalysis in the three-flavor NJL model with axial-vector interaction

In this paper we explore the chiral phase transition in QCD within the three-flavor Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model with a negative coupling constant in the isoscalar axial-vector channel, which is associated with a polarized instanton--anti-instanton molecule background. The QCD phase diagram described in this scenario shows a new first order phase transition around the transition temperature $T_c$ toward a phase without chiral condensates, but with nontrivial dynamic chiral chemical potentials for the light quarks, spontaneously giving rise to local $\mathcal {CP}$ violation and local chirality imbalance. The corresponding critical temperature $T_{5c}$ for this phase transition decreases with the magnetic field and it gives a natural explanation to the inverse magnetic catalysis effect for light quarks when incorporating a reasonable value of the coupling constant in the isoscalar axial-vector channel. Furthermore, when the isoscalar axial-vector interaction is dominant in light quark sector and suppressed in strange quark sector, it is found that there is no inverse magnetic catalysis for strange quark condensate, which agrees with lattice results.