Review of different approaches to understanding the phenomenon of diffraction

Abstract

This brief review of hard diffraction is focussed on the theory of the diffractive structure function F_2^D. Some aspects of diffractive vector meson production and of diffractive processes in hadron-hadron collisions are also discussed.

Comments: 4 pages LaTeX, talk at the Int. Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP 99), Tampere, Finland, July 15-21, 1999