We show that the HERA data for the inclusive structure function F 2 (x, Q 2 ) for x ≤ 10 −2 and 0.045 ≤ Q 2 ≤ 45 GeV 2 can be well described within the color dipole picture, with a simple analytic expression for the dipole-proton scattering amplitude, which is an approximate solution to the non-linear evolution equations in QCD. For dipole sizes less than the inverse saturation momentum 1/Q s (x), the scattering amplitude is the solution to the BFKL equation in the vicinity of the saturation line. It exhibits geometric scaling and scaling violations by the diffusion term. For dipole sizes larger than 1/Q s (x), the scattering amplitude saturates to one. The fit involves three parameters: the proton radius R, the value x 0 of x at which the saturation scale Q s equals 1GeV, and the logarithmic derivative of the saturation momentum λ. The value of λ extracted from the fit turns out to be consistent with a recent calculation using the next-to-leading order BFKL formalism.

We show the relevance of the nonlinear Fisher and Kolmogorov-Petrovsky-Piscounov (KPP) equation to the problem of high energy evolution of the QCD amplitudes. We explain how the traveling wave solutions of this equation are related to geometric scaling, a phenomenon observed in deepinelastic scattering experiments. Geometric scaling is for the first time shown to result from an exact solution of nonlinear QCD evolution equations. Using general results on the KPP equation, we compute the velocity of the wave front, which gives the full high energy dependence of the saturation scale.