Hard diffraction -- 20 years later

Abstract

The idea of diffractive processes with a hard scale involved, to resolve the underlying parton dynamics, was published 1985 and experimentally verified 1988. Today hard diffraction is an active research field with high-quality data and new theoretical models. The trend from Regge-based pomeron models to QCD-based parton level models has given insights on QCD dynamics involving perturbative gluon exchange mechanisms, including the predicted BFKL-dynamics, as well as novel ideas on non-perturbative colour fields and their interactions. Extrapolations to the LHC include the interesting possibility of diffractive Higgs production.

Comments: 14 pages, 19 figures. Invited talk at XXII International Symposium on Lepton-Photon Interactions at High Energy, Uppsala, Sweden, June 30-July 5, 2005