Diffractive structure function in the dipole picture

Abstract

We calculate the contribution from the q qg component of a virtual photon state to the small-x diffractive cross section in deep inelastic scattering in the saturation regime. The obtained cross section is finite by itself and a part of the full next-to-leading order result. We perform the calculation in exact kinematics in the eikonal limit, and show that the previously known high virtuality Q 2 and large invariant mass M 2 X results for the structure functions can be extracted. We furthermore discuss the steps required to obtain the full next-to-leading order result.