Diffractive production of electroweak vector bosons at the LHC

We analyse diffractive electroweak vector boson production in hadronic collisions and show that the single diffractive W boson production asymmetry in rapidity is a particularly good observable at the LHC to test the concept of the flavour symmetric pomeron parton distributions. It may also provide an additional constraint for the parton distribution functions in the proton.

Diffractive Parton Distributions from Fits with Higher Twist

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.

Diffractive structure function F_L^D from fits with higher twist

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.