Investigating the role of average color dipole size in BFKL Pomeron phenomenology

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Based on the QCD dipole picture of the BFKL Pomeron, we investigate the role played by the saturation scale, Qsat, in obtaining physical values for the affective strong coupling in phenomenological fits to small-x HERA data. The dependence on this scale appears since the collection of color dipoles characterizing the proton target have average size 1/Qsat, which is energy dependent. Physically, this means most of the color dipoles are above but sufficiently close to the border between a saturated and the dilute system. The analysis is first performed in the leading-logs BFKL approach in the saddle-point approximation and it could shed light in further investigations using resummed NLO BFKL kernels