Working in the SU(2) flavor version of the NJL model, we study the effect of taking a finite system volume on a strongly interacting system of quarks, and, in particular, the location of the chiral phase transition and the CEP. We consider two shapes for the volume, spherical and cubic regions with different sizes and different boundary conditions. To analyze the QCD phase diagram, we use a novel criterion to study the crossover zone. A comparison between the results obtained from the two different shapes and several boundary conditions is carried out. We use the method of Multiple Reflection Expansion to determine the density of states and three kinds of boundary conditions over the cubic shape. These boundary conditions are: periodic, anti-periodic and stationary boundary conditions on the quark fields.

In this article, we study the two-flavor Nambu and Jona-Lasinio (NJL) phase diagrams on the T-mu plane through three regularization methods. In one of these, we introduce an infrared three-momentum cutoff in addition to the usual ultraviolet regularization to the quark loop integrals and compare the obtained phase diagrams with those obtained from the NJL model with proper time regularization and Pauli-Villars regularization. We have found that the crossover appears as a band with a well-defined width in the T-mu plane. To determine the extension of the cross-over zone, we propose a novel criterion, comparing it to another criterion that is commonly reported in the literature; we then obtain the phase diagrams for each criterion. We study the behavior of the phase diagrams under all these schemes, focusing on the influence of the regularization procedure on the crossover zone and the presence or absence of critical end points.