Unitarity effects in DIS

Abstract

We argue that diffractive DIS, dominated by soft interactions, is probably the unique process which allows us to observe unitarity effects in DIS. Guided by a close analogy between the diffractive dissociation of a highly virtual photon and the elastic scattering of hadrons we propose a specific procedure to analyse the data in order to detect the onset of the unitarity limit. Lacking appropriate data, we use the predictions of a realistic model as an input for our analysis, to demonstrate that the output unitarity signal is sufficiently large to be detectable.