SCALING AND DIFFRACTION IN DEEP, INELASTIC-SCATTERING

We pursue the hypothesis that the events with a large rapidity gap, observed at HERA, reflect the scattering of electrons off lumps of wee partons inside the proton. A simple scaling behaviour is predicted for the diffractive structure functions, which are related to the inclusive structure function F-2(x, Q(2)) at small values of the scaling variable x. The results are compared with recent measurements of the diffractive structure function F-2(D)(x, Q(2), M(2)).