QCD Analysis of Diffractive and Leading-Proton DIS Structure Functions in the Framework of Fracture Functions

We present a combined QCD analysis of recent data produced by the H1 and ZEUS collaborations on the diffractive and leading-proton deep inelastic positron--proton scattering structure functions, $F_2^{D(3)}$ and $F_2^{LP(3)}$, respectively. It is shown that the QCD framework for semi-inclusive processes, based on fracture functions, allows a unified treatment of both diffractive and leading-proton processes, and offers a precise perturbative QCD description for them, alternative to those that rely on model-dependent assumptions, such as Regge factorization, or other non-perturbative approaches