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Measurement of f0(980) Elliptic Flow in Proton-Lead Collisions at the Large Hadron Collider and Its Possible Quark ContentAn Gu (17593179) 07 December 2023 (has links)
<h4>Exotic hadrons are hadrons with constituent quark content different from the normal meson and baryon. The f<sub>0</sub>(980) hadron is one of the exotic hadron candidates, which was first discovered in $\pi\pi$ scattering experiments in the 1970's. It could be a ordinary quarnk-antiquark meson, a tetraquark exotic state, a kaon-antikaon molecule, or a quark-antiquark-gluon hybrid state.</h4><p dir="ltr">Anisotropic flow (v<sub>n</sub>) is a powerful tool to probe the dynamics of relativistic heavy ion collisions. The observed approximate scaling of v<sub>n</sub> by the number of constituent quarks (NCQ) suggests the importance of partonic degree of freedom in these collisions. Large v<sub>n</sub> and NCQ-scaling have also been observed in high-multiplicity proton-lead (pPb) collisions at the LHC, suggesting similar dynamics in pPb collisions. The empirically established NCQ-scaling can be exploited to probe the constituent quark content of the f<sub>0</sub>(980) hadron.</p><p dir="ltr">We measure the elliptic flow (v<sub>2</sub>) of f<sub>0</sub>(980) in high-multiplicity pPb collisions at 8 TeV with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the LHC, through its main pion-pion ($\pi^+\pi^-$) decay channel. The invariant mass spectrum is obtained from opposite sign pion pairs, and the combinatorial background is estimated by same-sign pion pairs and subtracted. The f<sub>0</sub>(980) signal and the remaining residual background are modeled by relativistic Breit-Wigner and polynomial functions, respectively. The yield of f<sub>0</sub>(980) is extracted as a function of azimuthal angle relative to the event plane, and the f<sub>0</sub>(980) v<sub>2</sub> is measured as function of $p_T$, corrected for the event-plane resolution. The non-flow component in f<sub>0</sub>(980) v<sub>2</sub> has been estimated by that of K<sub>s</sub><sup>0</sup>. By comparing the measured v<sub>2</sub> of the f<sub>0</sub>(980) to those of other hadrons, we infer the number of constituent quarks for the f<sub>0</sub>(980) assuming NCQ scaling. The f<sub>0</sub>(980) is found to be a 2-quark state in this work. We discuss the systematic uncertainties involved in our study, implications of our result, and possible future works in this endeavor.</p>
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