Diffractive deep inelastic scattering from multiple soft gluon exchange in QCD

Abstract

Diffractive hard scattering is interpreted as the effect of soft gluon exchanges between the emerging energetic quarks and the nucleon's color field, resulting in an overall color singlet exchange. Summing multiple gluon exchanges to all orders leads to exponentiation and an amplitude in analytic form. Numerical evaluation reproduces the precise HERA data and gives new insights on the density of gluons in the proton.

Comments: 6 pages, 2 figures. Minor change to conventions in Eqs. (4-6), some discussion clarified. Version to appear in PLB