2026-07-072026-07-07http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/44281Based on the QCD dipole picture of the BFKL Pomeron, we investigate the role played by the saturation scale, Q_{sat}, 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/Q_{sat}, 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 kernelsHigh Energy Physics - PhenomenologyHigh Energy Physics - Experimenttext