Can Transverse Mass Scaling Shed Light on the Event-Activity Dependence of $Υ$ Mesons Production at LHC?
Measurements by the CMS experiment [CMS Collaboration, JHEP04 (2014) 103; CMS Collaboration, JHEP11 (2020) 001] reveal a deficit of charged particle tracks in events with higher $Υ$(nS) states. This observation is suggested to be a manifestation of the excited bottomonia suppression in $pp$ interactions. Transverse mass ($m_{\mathrm{T}}$) scaling can be implied to check this assumption in an independent way. The scaling has been observed for a wide range of particle species in proton-proton collisions at various energies from the SPS to RHIC and the LHC. The observed scaling is known to be different for baryons and mesons, and this work presents a comprehensive study of the $m_{\mathrm{T}}$-scaling of mesons at LHC energies with a focus on heavier mesons. The study demonstrates patterns in the scaling properties of mesons, which are related to the particle quark content. In particular, light species and ground-state quarkonia obey the same scaling, whereas open-flavor particles deviate from it because their spectra are significantly harder. The magnitude of deviation depends on the flavor of the heaviest quark in the meson. By extending the $m_{\mathrm{T}}$-scaling assumption to the excited bottomonia states, it is observed that the measured cross sections of $Υ$(2S) and $Υ$(3S) are reduced by factors of 1.6 and 2.4 compared to the expectation from the scaling. This observation is consistent with recently observed differences between the event-activity dependence of different $Υ$(nS) meson states.