THE POMERON STRUCTURE IN DIS AND GLUON RECOMBINATION EFFECTS

A formalism for diffractive deep inelastic scattering is presented based on the concept of a pomeron structure function. Assuming the pomeron to be essentially a gluonic object with the small size indicated by its small interaction cross-sections, we show that the QCD evolution of its structure function exhibits large screening corrections due to gluon recombinations at small-x. With a gluon-to-quark conversion appropriate at small-x, diffractive ep cross-sections are obtained giving large enough statistics at HERA to distinguish between QCD evolution governed by the conventional Altarelli-Parisi equations and by the non-linear Gribov-Levin-Ryskin equation.