Measurement of the Q2 and energy dependence of diffractive interactions at HERA: The ZEUS collaboration
European Physical Journal C 25:2 (2002) 169-187
Authors:
S Chekanov, D Krakauer, S Magill, B Musgrave, A Pellegrino, J Repond, R Yoshida, MCK Mattingly, P Antonioli, G Anzivino, G Bari, M Basile, L Bellagamba, D Boscherini, A Bruni, G Bruni, G Cara Romeo, M Chiarini, L Cifarelli, F Cindolo, A Contin, M Corradi, S De Pasquale, P Giusti, G Iacobucci, G Levi, A Margotti, T Massam, R Nania, C Nemoz, F Palmonari, A Pesci, G Sartorelli, Y Zamora Garcia, A Zichichi, G Aghuzumtsyan, D Bartsch, I Brock, J Crittenden, S Goers, H Hartmann, E Hilger, P Irrgang, HP Jakob, A Kappes, UF Katz, R Kerger, O Kind, E Paul, J Rautenberg, R Renner, H Schnurbusch, A Stifutkin, J Tandler, KC Voss, A Weber, DS Bailey, NH Brook, JE Cole, B Foster, GP Heath, HF Heath, S Robins, E Rodrigues, J Scott, RJ Tapper, M Wing, R Ayad, M Capua, L Iannotti, A Mastroberardino, M Schioppa, G Susinno, JY Kim, YK Kim, JH Lee, IT Lim, MY Pac, A Caldwell, M Helbich, X Liu, B Mellado, S Paganis, WB Schmidke, F Sciulli, J Chwastowski, A Eskreys, J Figiel, K Olkiewicz, MB Przybycień, P Stopa, L Zawiejski, B Bednarek, I Grabowska-Bold, K Jeleń, D Kisielewska, AM Kowal, M Kowal, T Kowalski, B Mindur
Abstract:
Diffractive dissociation of virtual photons, γ*p → Xp, has been studied in ep interactions with the ZEUS detector at HERA. The data cover photon virtualities 0.17 < Q2 < 0.70 GeV2 and 3 < Q2 < 80 GeV2 with 3 < MX < 38 GeV, where MX is the mass of the hadronic final state. Diffractive events were selected by two methods: the first required the detection of the scattered proton in the ZEUS leading proton spectrometer (LPS); the second was based on the distribution of MX. The integrated luminosities of the low- and high-Q2 samples used in the LPS-based analysis are ≃ 0.9 pb-1 and ≃ 3.3 pb-1, respectively. The sample used for the MX-based analysis corresponds to an integrated luminosity of ≃ 6.2 pb-1. The dependence of the diffractive cross section on W, the virtual photon-proton centre-of-mass energy, and on Q2 is studied. In the low-Q2 range, the energy dependence is compatible with Regge theory and is used to determine the intercept of the Pomeron trajectory. The W dependence of the diffractive cross section exhibits no significant change from the low-Q2 to the high-Q2 region. In the low-Q2 range, little Q2 dependence is found, a significantly different behaviour from the rapidly falling cross section measured for Q2 > 3 GeV2. The ratio of the diffractive to the virtual photon-proton total cross section is studied as a function of W and Q2. Comparisons are made with a model based on perturbative QCD.
