The relation between the Good-Walker and triple-regge formalisms for diffractive excitation

In this Letter we analyze the relation between the triple-pomeron and Good-Walker formalisms for diffractive excitation in DIS and hadronic collisions. In both approaches gap events are interpreted as the shadow of absorption into inelastic channels. We here argue that the two formalisms are just different views of the same phenomenon. We first demonstrate how this relation works in a simple toy model, and then show how the relevant features of the toy model are also realized in real perturbative QCD.