Diffraction at HERA

Abstract

Between 1992 and 2007, the HERA accelerator provided $ep$ collisions at center of mass energies beyond $300 \ {\rm GeV}$ at the interaction points of the H1 and ZEUS experiments. Interesting results to emerge relate to the newly accessed field of perturbative strong interaction physics at low Bjorken-$x$, where parton densities become extremely large. Questions arise as to how and where non-linear dynamics tame the parton density growth and challenging features such as geometric scaling are observed. Central to this low $x$ physics landscape is a high rate of diffractive processes, in which a colorless exchange takes place and the proton remains intact. A review is given for main results obtained by H1 and ZEUS experiments in this field.