Diffractive structure function in the dipole picture

Abstract

We calculate the contribution from the $q\bar{q}g$ component of a virtual photon state to the small-$x$ diffractive cross section in deep inelastic scattering in the saturation regime. The obtained cross section is finite by itself and a part of the full next-to-leading order result. We perform the calculation in exact kinematics in the eikonal limit, and show that the previously known high virtuality $Q^2$ and large invariant mass $M_X^2$ results for the structure functions can be extracted. We furthermore discuss the steps required to obtain the full next-to-leading order result.