Diffractive deep inelastic scattering from multiple soft gluon exchange in QCD

TL;DR

This paper models diffractive deep inelastic scattering as soft gluon exchanges, deriving an analytic amplitude that matches HERA data and offers new insights into proton gluon density.

Contribution

It introduces an all-orders exponentiation of multiple soft gluon exchanges in QCD, providing an analytic form for the scattering amplitude and matching experimental data.

Findings

Numerical results reproduce HERA diffractive scattering data.

Provides new insights into the gluon density within the proton.

Develops an analytic expression for soft gluon exchange amplitudes.

Abstract

Diffractive hard scattering is interpreted as the effect of soft gluon exchanges between the emerging energetic quarks and the nucleon's color field, resulting in an overall color singlet exchange. Summing multiple gluon exchanges to all orders leads to exponentiation and an amplitude in analytic form. Numerical evaluation reproduces the precise HERA data and gives new insights on the density of gluons in the proton.