Forward jets in the color-dipole model

We show that a forward jet with large transverse momentum in an quarkonium-quarkonium collision is a hard probe which can be effectively characterized by a color-dipole distribution at the time of the interaction. The dipole distribution is computed, and compared to its counterpart for a virtual photon in the initial state. We find that, while in the photon case the tail of large sizes is exponentially cut off, it contributes sizably in the forward-jet case, which signs the sensitivity of observables based on such events to the infrared region. Moreover, a direct probabilistic interpretation of the dipole distribution fails since it takes negative values in the large size region.