Violation of the elliptic flow scaling of f₀(980) in p-Pb collisions at the LHC

¹ School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
² Nuclear Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
³ Physics Department, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
⁴ Cyclotron Institute and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA
⁵ Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
⁶ School of Physical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
⁷ Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730000, China
⁸ Center for High Energy Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

^* Speaker, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Published online: 17 April 2026

Abstract

We investigate the production and elliptic flow of the f₀(980) in high-multiplicity p–Pb collisions at √s_NN = 5.02 TeV using a hadronic coalescence model with the K and K̅ phase-space distributions provided by the Hydro–Coal–Frag hybrid model. Our results, which agree with the ALICE and CMS measurements, support the KK̅ molecular interpretation of the f₀(980) structure and show, however, a breakdown of the simple number-of-constituent (NC) scaling of its elliptic flow. The latter is in contrast to the deuteron elliptic flow, which exhibits a significantly better NC scaling when the same coalescence width parameter is used.