  We demonstrate that a trigger on hard dijet production at small rapidities
allows to establish a quantitative distinction between central and peripheral
collisions in pbar-p and p-p collisions at Tevatron and LHC energies. Such a
trigger strongly reduces the effective impact parameters as compared to minimum
bias events. This happens because the transverse spatial distribution of hard
partons (x >~ 10^{-2}) in the proton is considerably narrower than that of soft
partons, whose collisions dominate the total cross section. In the central
collisions selected by the trigger, most of the partons with x >~ 10^{-2}
interact with a gluon field whose strength rapidly increases with energy. At
LHC (and to some extent already at Tevatron) energies the strength of this
interaction approaches the unitarity ('black-body') limit. This leads to
specific modifications of the final state, such as a higher probability of
multijet events at small rapidities, a strong increase of the transverse
momenta and depletion of the longitudinal momenta at large rapidities, and the
appearance of long-range correlations in rapidity between the forward/backward
fragmentation regions. The same pattern is expected for events with production
of new heavy particles (Higgs, SUSY). Studies of these phenomena would be
feasible with the CMS-TOTEM detector setup, and would have considerable impact
on the exploration of the physics of strong gluon fields in QCD, as well as the
search for new particles at LHC.
