What can the final state particles in diffractive lepton-nucleon scattering tell us?

Abstract

The colorless objects(s) in diffractive lepton-nucleon scattering in the small-$x_B$ region can be probed by examing the final state particles in such processes: (A) Perform multiplicity and/or energy factorial moment analyses, and check especially the $x_B$- and $Q^2$-dependence of the intermittency-indices. (B) Examine the diffractive structure function $F_2^{D(3)}(\beta,Q^2;x_P)$ as function of $x_P$ for different $\beta$ and $Q^2$. It is shown that such analyses and measurements can yield useful information on the hadronization process and on the intrinsic properties of the colorless objects. In particular, the observation of power-law distributions of $F_2^{D(3)}(\beta,Q^2;x_P)$ with respect to $x_P$ and with respect to $x_B$ --- independent of $\beta$ and $Q^2$-values may be considered as strong indication for the existence of self-organized criticality in gluon-cluster formation processes.