AbstractIn this article, we study the two-flavor Nambu and Jona-Lasinio (NJL) phase diagrams on the T–μ 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–μ plane. To determine the extension of the crossover 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.