Critical behavior towards the chiral limit at vanishing and non-vanishing chemical potentials

Abstract: We study the scaling behavior of the (2+1)-flavor QCD crossover region towards the chiral limit with smaller-than-physical light quark mass gauge ensembles, generated using the HISQ fermion discretization. At zero chemical potential, we study the fluctuations of conserved charges and their correlations with the chiral condensate, towards the chiral limit. We analyse the role of universal and regular contributions to the above quantities. We find a preliminary estimate of the leading curvature coefficient of the chiral phase transition line using scaling arguments.