Deep-inelastic diffraction and the pomeron as a single gluon

Deep-inelastic diffractive scaling provides fundamental insight into the QCD pomeron. It is argued that single gluon domination of the structure function, together with the well-known Regge pole property, determines that the pomeron carries color-change parity C{sub c} = {minus}1 and, at short distances, is in a super-critical phase of Reggeon Field Theory. The main purpose of the talk is to describe the relationship of the super-critical pomeron to QCD