Evidence for the discrete asymptotically-free BFKL Pomeron from HERA data

We show that the next-to-leading-order renormalization-group-improved asymptotically-free BFKL Pomeron provides a good fit to HERA data on virtual photoproduction at small x and large Q2. The leading discrete Pomeron pole reproduces qualitatively the Q2 dependence of the HERA data for x∼10−3, and a fit using the three leading discrete singularities reproduces quantitatively the Q2 and x dependence of the HERA data for x<10−2. This fit fixes the phase for all the BFKL wavefunctions at a chosen infrared scale.