Abstract
We present a combined QCD analysis of recent data produced by the H1 and ZEUS Collaborations on the diffractive and leading-proton deep inelastic positron-proton scattering structure functions F2D(3) and F2LP(3), respectively. It is shown that the QCD framework for semi-inclusive processes, based on fracture functions, allows a unified treatment of both diffractive and leading-proton processes, and offers a precise perturbative QCD description for them, alternative to those that rely on model-dependent assumptions, such as Regge factorization, or other nonperturbative approaches.
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