Diffractive parton distributions of the proton are determined from fits to diffractive data from HERA. In addition to the twist--2 contribution, the twist--4 contribution from longitudinally polarised virtual photons is considered, which is important in the region of small diffractive masses. A new prediction for the longitudinal diffractive structure function is presented which differs significantly from that obtained in the pure twist--2 analyses.
We determine diffractive parton distributions of the proton from DGLAP based fits to HERA data including the twist--4 contribution from longitudinal polarized virtual photons, which is known to be important in the region of large beta. The biggest impact of this contribution is on the diffractive gluon distribution and on the diffractive longitudinal structure function to be determined from HERA data.
We make predictions for the diffractive longitudinal structure function F_L^D to be measured at HERA, based on DGLAP fits of diffractive parton distributions with twist--4 contribution. This contribution describes diffractive qqbar production from longitudinal photons and significantly changes predictions for F_L^D obtained in pure DGLAP analyses.
Through explicit examples we show that twist-4 parton distributions have no parton interpretation in the sense that parton or partons inside a hadron can carry the momentum fraction $x$ of the hadron with $x >1$ or $x<-1$. The studied twist-4 parton distributions of collinear factoization are power-divergent for $vert xvert >1$. The corresponding transverse momentum dependent parton distributions have also no parton interpretation. They are finite. The implications of our results are discussed.
Higher twist corrections to the structure function F_2 at small x are studied for the case of a flat initial condition for the twist-two QCD evolution in the next-to-leading order approximation. We present an analytical parameterization of the contributions from the twist-two and higher twist operators of the Wilson operator product expansion. Higher twist terms are evaluated using two different approaches, one motivated by BFKL and the other motivated by the renormalon formalism. The results of the latter approach are in very good agreement with deep inelastic scattering data from HERA.
We discuss recent theoretical results on diffractive deeply inelastic scattering, focusing on the partonic picture of diffraction in configuration space and the predictions for the beta behavior and the scaling violation.