Rapidity Gaps in DIS through Soft Colour Interactions

Abstract

We present a new mechanism for the creation of large rapidity gaps in DIS events at HERA. Soft colour interactions between perturbatively produced partons and colour-charges in the proton remnant, modifies the colour structure for hadronization giving colour singlet systems that are well separated in rapidity. An explicit model is presented that, although the detailed results depend on the initial state parton emission, can describe both the observed rapidity gaps and, in addition, the forward energy flow in an inclusive event sample.