Violation of the elliptic flow scaling of $f_0(980)$ in p-Pb collisions at the LHC

Abstract

We investigate the production and elliptic flow of the $f_0(980)$ in high-multiplicity p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=5.02$ TeV using a hadronic coalescence model with the $K$ and $\bar K$ phase-space distributions provided by the Hydro-Coal-Frag hybrid model. Our results, which agree with the ALICE and CMS measurements, support the $K\bar K$ molecular interpretation of the $f_0(980)$ 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.