Breakdown of QCD factorization in hard diffraction

Abstract

Factorization of short- and long-distance interactions is severely broken in hard diffractive hadronic collisions. Interaction with the spectator partons leads to an interplay between soft and hard scales, which results in a leading twist behavior of the cross section, on the contrary to the higher twist predicted by factorization. This feature is explicitly demonstrated for diffractive radiation of abelian (Drell-Yan, gauge bosons, Higgs) and non-abelian (heavy flavors) particles