Inclusive inelastic hadron diffraction

We show that angular distributions of the inclusive hadron inelastic diffraction at small momentum transfers are determined by elastic scattering in the transition region between the forward peak and the diffractive minimum. This is due to a multi-channel correction, accounting for intermediate transitions inside an equivalence class of diffractive states,which factorizes in the form NΔt to be taken in the Bjorken-like limit: N→∞, Δt→0 such that NΔt is finite.