Collinear and TMD distributions with dynamical soft-gluon resolution scale

Abstract Soft-gluon resolution scales characterize parton branching Monte Carlo implementations of the evolution equations for parton distribution functions in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). We examine scenarios with dynamical, i.e., branching-scale dependent, resolution scale, and discuss physical implications for both collinear and transverse-momentum dependent (TMD) distributions. We perform the first determination of parton distributions with dynamical resolution scale, at next-to-leading order (NLO) in perturbation theory, from fits to precision deep-inelastic scattering measurements from HERA. We present an application of TMD distributions with dynamical resolution scale to Drell-Yan lepton-pair transverse momentum spectra at the LHC and lower-energy experiments, and comment on the extraction of non-perturbative intrinsic-k T parameters from Drell-Yan data at small transverse momenta.