Diffraction and Low-Q^2 Physics Including Two-Photon Physics

Abstract

Recent experimental results on the partonic structure of the photon and on the color singlet exchange in strong interaction processes are reviewed. At the LEP electron-positron and HERA lepton-proton colliders, complementary and consistent measurements have been achieved on the quark-gluon structure of quasi-real and virtual photons. At the HERA lepton-proton and Tevatron proton-antiproton colliders, the quark-gluon configuration of the diffractive exchange is consistently found to have a large gluon component. The rate of diffractive interactions observed by the HERA and Tevatron experiments, however, is largely different and challenges explanation (invited plenary talk at the XXIX International Conference on High Energy Physics, Vancouver, B.C. Canada (1998)).Comment: 36 pages (Latex), 35 figures (Postscript); in this replaced version the report on 'Structure Functions' by A.T.Doyle has been taken out and is available in hep-ex/981202