From Factorization to Its Breaking in Diffractive Dijet Production

Abstract

When comparing recent experimental data from the H1 and ZEUS Collaborations at HERA for diffractive dijet production in deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) and photoproduction with next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD predictions using diffractive parton densities, good agreement is found for DIS. However, the dijet photoproduction data are overestimated by the NLO theory, showing that factorization breaking occurs at this order. While this is expected theoretically for resolved photoproduction, the fact that the data are better described by a global suppression of direct and resolved contribution by about a factor of two comes as a surprise. We therefore discuss in some detail the factorization scheme and scale dependence between direct and resolved contributions and propose a new factorization scheme for diffractive dijet photoproduction.