Over the past few decades, underground laboratories have collected extensive data on cosmic-ray muons, which penetrate deep underground with energies ranging from hundreds of GeV to PeV. While useful for atmospheric and geological studies, these muons pose significant challenges to low-background experiments in dark matter and neutrino physics.
In this talk, we present two complementary, high-precision approaches to modelling surface and underground muon fluxes. The first, daemonflux (DAta-drivEn and MuOn-calibrated Neutrino flux) [1, 2], is based on state-of-the-art descriptions of particle cascades, hadron production, and cosmic-ray flux, and is calibrated to surface muon flux and charge ratio measurements, resulting in significantly reduced prediction uncertainties compared to previous methods. The second, MUTE (MUon inTensity codE) [3, 4], is an open-source tool built on a fast convolution scheme leveraging daemonflux predictions to accurately predict underground muon intensities, angular and energy spectra, and seasonal flux variations under realistic geological conditions. Because our calculations do not rely on underground measurements of muons or other secondaries, we verify the consistency of the measurements across different detectors at different sites. Our results show excellent agreement with underground data, notably matching LVD measurements at Gran Sasso.
Daemonflux and MUTE are publicly available programs, providing solid frameworks for accurate muon flux predictions in various environments, and valuable for applications within astroparticle physics.
[1] J. P. Yañez and A. Fedynitch, Phys. Rev. D 107, 123037 (2023)
[2] https://github.com/mceq-project/daemonflux
[3] W. Woodley, A. Fedynitch, and M.-C. Piro, Phys. Rev. D 110, 063006 (2024)
[4] https://github.com/wjwoodley/mute
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William Woodlley
Department of Physics
University of Alberta
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