Charged Particle Multiplicity in Diffractive Deep Inelastic Scattering

Abstract

The recent data from H1 Collaboration on hadron multiplicity in diffractive DIS has been studied in the framework of perturbative QCD as a function of invariant diffractive mass. The formulas obtained explain the observed excess of particle production in diffractive DIS relative to that in DIS and $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ annihilation. It is shown that the results are sensitive to the quark--gluon structure of the Pomeron. Namely, the data say in favour of a super-hard gluon distribution at the initial scale.

Comments: 12 pages, 3 figures; to be published in Phys. Rev. D