  Since the incident nuclei in heavy-ion collisions do not carry strangeness,
the global net strangeness of the detected hadrons has to vanish. We
investigate the impact of strangeness neutrality on the phase structure and
thermodynamics of QCD at finite baryon and strangeness chemical potential. To
this end, we study the low-energy sector of QCD within a Polyakov loop enhanced
quark-meson effective theory with 2+1 dynamical quark flavors. Non-perturbative
quantum, thermal, and density fluctuations are taken into account with the
functional renormalization group. We show that the impact of strangeness
neutrality on thermodynamic quantities such as the equation of state is
sizable.
