Photon contribution to the “super-hard” pomeron

It is shown that direct photons provide a leading twist mechanism for diffractive jet production in which the jets carry away all of the momentum lost by the proton. Two-photon processes are thus expected to asymptotically dominate “super-hard” pomeron events in ep collisions. We report the expected rates from these events for recent ZEUS and H1 data cuts. We also estimate the direct photon contribution to the “super-hard” pomeron events observed by the CERN UA8 group for pp collisions. It is again argued that direct photons are the leading mechanism for these events. We find that direct photons are an appreciable fraction of the events seen by UA8.