We consider the thermodynamics of chiral models in the mean-field
approximation and discuss the relevance of the (frequently omitted) fermion
vacuum loop. Within the chiral quark-meson model and its Polyakov loop extended
version, we show that the fermion vacuum fluctuations can change the order of
the phase transition in the chiral limit and strongly influence physical
observables. We compute the temperature-dependent effective potential and
baryon number susceptibilities in these models, with and without the vacuum
term, and explore the cutoff and the pion mass dependence of the
susceptibilities. Finally, in the renormalized model the divergent vacuum
contribution is removed using the dimensional regularization.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure
