Geometric scaling in diffractive deep inelastic scattering

Abstract

The geometric scaling property observed in the HERA data at small x, that the deep inelastic scattering (DIS) total cross-section is a function of only the variable Q^2*x^\lambda, has been argued to be a manifestation of the saturation regime of QCD and of the saturation scale Q^2_s(x) x^{-\lambda}. We show that this implies a similar scaling in the context of diffractive DIS and we observe, for several diffractive observables, that the experimental data from HERA confirm the expectations of this scaling.

Comments: 9 pages, 3 figures, references added, version to appear in PLB