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 Q^2. The leading discrete Pomeron pole reproduces qualitatively the Q^2 dependence of the HERA data for x ~10^{-3}, and a fit using the three leading discrete singularities reproduces quantitatively the Q^2 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.