UNITARITY EFFECTS IN DIS

We argue that diffractive DIS, dominated by soft interactions, is prob ably the unique process which allows us to observe unitarity effects i n DIS. Guided by a close analogy between the diffractive dissociation of a highly virtual photon and the elastic scattering of hadrons we pr opose a specific procedure to analyse the data in order to detect the onset of the unitarity limit. Lacking appropriate data, we use the pre dictions of a realistic model as an input for our analysis to demonstr ate that the output unitarity signal is sufficiently large to be detec table. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.