We report on investigations concerning the production of large transverse momentum jets in DIS diffractive dissociation. These processes constitute a new class of events that allow for a clean test of perturbative QCD and of the hard (perturbative) pomeron picture. The measurement of the corresponding cross sections might possibly serve to determine the gluon density of the proton.
A new method of extracting diffractive parton distributions is presented which avoids the use of Regge theory ansatz and is in much closer relation with the factorisation theorem for diffractive hard processes.
Using the Good and Walker picture, we derive a simple formula for diffractive dissociation that can apply to recent data collected at HERA in the low Q2 regime.
We calculate the diffraction slope $B_{D}$ for diffractive DIS. We find a counterintuitive rise of $B_{D}$ from exclusive diffractive excitation of vector mesons to excitation of continuum states with $M^{2} sim Q^{2}$. For the small-mass continuum we predict a rapid variation of $B_{D}$ with $M^{2}$ on the scale $m_{V}^{2}$ and a sharp drop of $B_{D}$ for a small-mass continuum above the vector meson excitation.
We have recently studied the QCD pomeron loop evolution equations in zero transverse dimensions [Shoshi:2005pf]. Using the techniques developed in [Shoshi:2005pf] together with the AGK cutting rules, we present a calculation of single, double and central diffractive cross sections (for large diffractive masses and large rapidity gaps) in zero transverse dimensions in which all dominant pomeron loop graphs are consistently summed. We find that the diffractive cross sections unitarise at asymptotic energies and that they are suppressed by powers of alpha_s. Our calculation is expected to expose some of the diffractive physics in hadron-hadron collisions at high energy.
The existing theory of hard exclusive QCD processes is based on two assumptions: (i) $factorization$ into a $hard,block$ times light front distribution amplitudes (DAs); (ii) use of perturbative gluon exchanges within the hard block. However, unlike DIS and jet physics, the characteristic momentum transfer $Q$ involved in the factorized block is not large enough for this theory to be phenomenologically successful. In this work, we revisit the latter assumption (ii), by explicitly calculating the $instanton-induced$ contributions to the hard block, and show that they contribute substantially to the vector, scalar and gravitational form factors of the pseudoscalar, scalar and vector mesons, over a wide range of momentum transfer.