The role of resolved virtual photons in the production of forward jets at HERA

The measurement of forward jet cross sections has been suggested as a promising probe of new small x parton dynamics and the question is whether the new HERA data provide an indication of this. In this paper the influence of resolved photon processes has been investigated and it has been studied to what extent the inclusion of such processes in addition to normal deep inelastic scattering leads to agreement with data. It is shown that two DGLAP evolution chains from the hard scattering process towards the proton and the photon respectively, are sufficient to describe effects observed in the HERA data, which have been attributed to BFKL dynamics. Received: 11 March 1999 / Published online: 18 June 1999