QCD ANALYSIS OF DIFFRACTIVE AND LEADING-PROTON DIS STRUCTURE FUNCTIONS IN THE FRAMEWORK OF FRACTURE FUNCTIONS - ART. NO. 054003

We present a combined QCD analysis of recent data produced by the H1 a nd ZEUS Collaborations on the diffractive and leading-proton deep inel astic positron-proton scattering structure functions F-2(D(3)) and F-2 (LP(3)), respectively. It is shown that the QCD framework for semi-inc lusive processes, based on fracture functions? allows a unified treatm ent of both diffractive and leading-proton processes, and offers a pre cise perturbative QCD description for them, alternative to those that rely on model-dependent assumptions, such as Regge factorization, or o ther nonperturbative approaches. [S0556-2821(98)07115-X].