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

Can one probe the structure function of the pomeron?

We discuss whether the diffractive structure functions defined by current experiments at HERA are indeed probing the partonic structure function of the pomeron. We observe that the {\it pseudorapidity} cuts commonly employed require that the struck parton in the pomeron be far off mass shell in sizeable regions of parameter space. As a result an interpretation in terms of constituent partons within the pomeron is inadequate. One may nevertheless use a partonic description for the {\it amplitude} for virtual photon-pomeron scattering to compute a diffractive structure function for pseudorapidity gap events. The resulting form may have significant scaling violation.Comment: 11 pages LaTeX, uses epsf, 5 eps figures appended as a uuencoded gzipped tarred fil

Rapidity Gaps in DIS through Soft Colour Interactions

We present a new mechanism for the creation of large rapidity gaps in DIS events at HERA. Soft colour interactions between perturbatively produced partons and colour-charges in the proton remnant, modifies the colour structure for hadronization giving colour singlet systems that are well separated in rapidity. An explicit model is presented that, although the detailed results depend on the initial state parton emission, can describe both the observed rapidity gaps and, in addition, the forward energy flow in an inclusive event sample.Comment: 4 pages Latex, 4 encapsulated Postscript figures, uses qcdparis.sty, tar-compressed and uuencoded with uufiles, Presented by GI at workshop `DIS and QCD', Paris, April 1995, minor Postscript problem fixe