Fluctuations, saturation, and diffractive excitation in high energy collisions
Diffractive excitation is usually described by the Good-Walker formalism for low masses, and by the triple-Regge formalism for high masses. In the Good-Walker formalism the cross section is determined by the fluctuations in the interaction. In this paper we show that by taking the fluctuations in the BFKL ladder into account, it is possible to describe both low and high mass excitation by the Good