Hard diffraction -- 20 years later

The idea of diffractive processes with a hard scale involved, to resolve the underlying parton dynamics, was published 1985 and experimentally verified 1988. Today hard diffraction is an active research field with high-quality data and new theoretical models. The trend from Regge-based pomeron models to QCD-based parton level models has given insights on QCD dynamics involving perturbative gluon exchange mechanisms, including the predicted BFKL-dynamics, as well as novel ideas on non-perturbative colour fields and their interactions. Extrapolations to the LHC include the interesting possibility of diffractive Higgs production.Comment: 14 pages, 19 figures. Invited talk at XXII International Symposium on Lepton-Photon Interactions at High Energy, Uppsala, Sweden, June 30-July 5, 200

Soft Colour Interactions in Non-perturbative QCD

Improved understanding of non-perturbative QCD dynamics can be obtained in terms of soft colour exchange models. Their essence is the variation of colour string-field topologies giving a unified description of final states in high energy interactions. In particular, both events with and without large rapidity gaps are obtained in agreement with data from ep at HERA and ppbar at the Tevatron, where also the surprisingly large production rate of high-p_T charmonium and bottomonium is reproduced.Comment: 4 pages, contribution to PANIC 99 conference proceedings, to appear in Nucl. Phys. A. Uses espcrc1.st

Rapidity Gaps from Colour String Topologies

Diffractive deep inelastic scattering at HERA and diffractive W and jet production at the Tevatron are well described by soft colour exchange models. Their essence is the variation of colour string-field topologies giving both gap and no-gap events, with a smooth transition and thereby a unified description of all final states.Comment: 3 pages, 6 eps figures, contribution to the DIS 99 workshop proceedings, uses npb.st

Properties of HERA Events from DIS on Pions in the Proton

Recently the concept of the pion cloud in the nucleon turned out to be successful in understanding the Gottfried sum rule violation observed by the New Muon Collaboration and the Drell--Yan asymmetry measured in NA51 at CERN. We propose a further possibility to test this concept at HERA through the analysis of the structure of deep inelastic scattering (DIS) events induced by pion--exchange. Momentum and energy distributions of outgoing nucleons as well as rapidity and multiplicity distributions are investigated using Monte Carlo simulations. Most observables cannot distinguish this process from ordinary DIS, but in the energy distribution of final neutrons we find a significantly different prediction from the pion cloud model. Forward neutron calorimeters will be essential to test the concept of pions in the nucleon.Comment: LaTeX file and gziped tar file with eps figures, 14 page

QCD rescattering mechanism for diffractive deep inelastic scattering

We present a QCD-based model where rescattering between final state partons in deep inelastic scattering leads to events with large rapidity gaps and a leading proton. In the framework of this model the amplitude for multiple gluon exchanges is calculated in the eikonal approximation to all orders in perturbation theory. Both large and small invariant mass M_X limits are considered. The model successfully describes the precise HERA data on the diffractive deep inelastic cross section in the whole available kinematical range and gives new insight into the density of gluons at very small momentum fractions in the proton.Comment: 19 pages, 14 figures. Version to appear in PR

Soft Colour Interactions and Diffractive Hard Scattering at the Tevatron

We make a brief presentation of the soft colour interactions models, the Soft Colour Interaction and the Generalised Area Law, and summarise the results when they are applied to p-pbar scattering. The models give a good description of the Tevatron data on production of W, bottom and jets in diffractive events, as well as jets with two rapidity gaps, alternatively leading particles. We also give predictions for diffractive J/psi production and discuss diffractive Higgs production at the Tevatron and LHC.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, uses JHEP style. Talk presented at the International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS HEP 2001), Budapest, 12-18 July 200