A fresh look at factorization breaking in diffractive photoproduction of dijets at HERA at next-to-leading order QCD

We calculate the cross section of diffractive dijet photoproduction in $ep$ scattering at next-to-leading order (NLO) of perturbative QCD (pQCD), which we supplement by a model of factorization breaking for the resolved-photon contribution. In this model, the suppression depends on the flavor and momentum fraction of the partons in the photon. We show that within experimental and theoretical uncertainties, the resulting approach provides a good description of the available HERA data in most of the bins. Hence, taken together with the observation that NLO pQCD explains well the data on diffractive photoproduction of open charm in $ep$ scattering, our model of factorization breaking presents a viable alternative to the scheme based on the global suppression factor.