Hard diffractive Photon-Proton Scattering at large t

Abstract

We propose to test perturbative QCD in the Regge limit by means of diffractive photon scattering $\gamma p\to \gamma X$ at large $t$ and very high energies $W^2\gg |t|\gg {\Lambda }_{QCD}^2$. The helicity amplitudes of this process were calculated using the Lipatov solution of the BFKL equation for $t\ne 0$. We found that the perturbatively calculated cross section for this process exceeds the cross section for $J/\Psi$ photoproduction assuming similar kinematics.

Comments: 14 pages, LaTex, 2 figures