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

We investigate the production and elliptic flow of the f₀ (980) in high-multiplicity p-Pb collisions at s₍₍=5. 02 TeV using a hadronic coalescence model with the K and 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 K 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.