Diploma work

martin @ quark.lu.se A possible explanation to the occurrence of so-called diffractive events in electron-proton collisions at HERA is given through the introduction of an object called the pomeron. The pomeron is assumed to consist of gluons and quarks. In this report a variable describing the fraction of the total pomeron momentum carried by these so-called partons, the xparton/IP (parton/pomeron-x) has been studied. The study was performed using data from computer simulations made with the RAPGAP Monte Carlo generator as well as experimental data collected with the H1 experiment in 1994. The description of the pomeron in the simulations is based on a pomeron structure function obtained from a fit to experimental data. Our study of Monte Carlo simulated data shows that a determination of the xparton/IP is feasible i.e. the error of our measurement is expected to be satisfactorily low. The xparton/IP distributions from simulated and experimental data have been compared. Disagreements between these two distributions can be observed, indicating that th