Speaker
Description
Diffractive processes are events with large rapidity gaps, which typically comprise a double-digit percent of events at colliders. Last year I discussed coherent diffraction with an intact scattered proton, whereas in this talk I focus on incoherent diffraction, where the proton is scattered into a jet. We derive the factorization of this process using Glauber SCET, showing that it splits apart into universal soft and hadronic functions. We compare and contrast this factorization to prevailing models in the literature. We further show that in diffractive $ep$ scattering, there are four nontrivial unpolarized (and four polarized) diffractive structure functions at leading order, including the conventionally studied $F_2$ and $F_L$, as well as two less-studied structures that in certain phase space regions comprise a large portion of the cross-section. Our work provides new observables and perturbative predictions for HERA and the EIC, and lays a path forward for studies of broader classes of diffractive processes, including at the LHC.