Diffractive dissociation in deep inelastic scattering at HERA

The diffraction dissociation of virtual photons is considered in the framework of conventional Regge theory. It is shown that the recent HERA data on large rapidity gap events can be successfully described in terms of the pomeron structure function. Using Regge factorization, the latter can be related to the deuteron structure function. The parameters which relate these two structure functions are determined from soft hadronic diffraction data. The size of the shadowing corrections at low x and large Q2 is also obtained.