2023

The CMS collaboration; Tumasyan, A.; Adam, W.; Eerola, P.; Forthomme, Laurent; Kirschenmann, H.; Österberg, K.; Voutilainen, M.; Bharthuar, Shudhashil; Brücken, Erik; Garcia, F.; Havukainen, J.; Heikkilä, Jaana; Kim, Minsuk; Kinnunen, R.; Lampén, T.; Lassila-Perini, K.; Laurila, S.; Lehti, S.; Lindén, T.

Protons consist of three valence quarks, two up-quarks and one down-quark, held together by gluons and a sea of quark-antiquark pairs. Collectively, quarks and gluons are referred to as partons. In a proton-proton collision, typically only one parton of each proton undergoes a hard scattering – referred to as single-parton scattering – leaving the remainder of each proton only slightly disturbed. Here, we report the study of double- and triple-parton scatterings through the simultaneous production of three J/? mesons, which consist of a charm quark-antiquark pair, in proton-proton collisions recorded with the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. We observed this process – reconstructed through the decays of J/? mesons into pairs of oppositely charged muons – with a statistical significance above five standard deviations. We measured the inclusive fiducial cross-section to be $$27{2}_{-104}^{+141}\,{{{\rm{(stat)}}}}\,\pm 17\,{{{\rm{(syst)}}}}\,{{{\rm{fb}}}}\,$$ 27 2 - 104 + 141 (stat) ± 17 (syst) fb , and compared it to theoretical expectations for triple-J/? meson production in single-, double- and triple-parton scattering scenarios. Assuming factorization of multiple hard-scattering probabilities in terms of single-parton scattering cross-sections, double- and triple-parton scattering are the dominant contributions for the measured process.