  The region of the Columbia plot with two light quark flavors is not yet
conclusively understood. Non-perturbative effects, e.g. the magnitude of the
anomalous U(1) axial symmetry breaking, decides on the nature of the phase
transition in this region. We report on our study of this region of the
Columbia plot using lattice techniques. We use gauge field ensembles generated
within the Highly Improved Staggered Quark discretization scheme, with the
strange quark mass fixed at its physical value and the light quark mass varied
such that $m_l=m_s/27$ and $m_s/40$, where $m_l=m_s/27$ corresponds to the
physical light quark mass. We study the eigenvalue spectrum of QCD using the
overlap Dirac operator on these gauge field ensembles at finite temperature
around the chiral transition temperature $T_c$, as the light quark masses
approach the chiral limit, and infer about the fate of the anomalous $U_A(1)$
symmetry breaking.

High Energy Physics - Lattice