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arXiv · 2607.12006

Minding the gap between hard and diffractive structure functions at the EIC

June-Haak Ee·Christopher Lee·Stella T. Schindler
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Abstract

Diffraction is characterized by forward scattering and a large rapidity gap. Ordinary hard scattering also produces gapped events and presents a significant background to identification of diffractively produced events. We present a fully differential factorization of gapped hard $ep$ scattering. We find that the unpolarized azimuthally-dependent structure functions $F_{3,4}^{\rm gap}$ and the longitudinal $F_L^{\rm gap}$ vanish at leading power for hard scattering. Azimuthal dependence is thus a pure diffractive signature. This is borne out in Monte Carlo simulations.

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June-Haak Ee, Christopher Lee, Stella T. Schindler. 2026-07-13. Minding the gap between hard and diffractive structure functions at the EIC. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12006

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