Comparing Calculations of Seasonal Variations of Atmospheric Muons in Deep Underground Detectors

TL;DR

This paper predicts daily atmospheric muon flux variations at 2000 m.w.e. depth using a new software tool combining atmospheric cascade modeling and lepton propagation, comparing results across models and previous methods.

Contribution

It introduces MUTE, a novel software combining MCEq and PROPOSAL for calculating seasonal muon flux variations in deep underground detectors.

Findings

Flux estimates vary with different cosmic-ray and hadronic models.

Results are compared to previous calculation methods.

The approach improves understanding of atmospheric muon seasonal variations.

Abstract

Cosmic rays interact with nuclei in the Earth's atmosphere to produce extensive air showers, which give rise to the atmospheric muon flux. Temperature fluctuations in the atmosphere influence the rate of muons measured in deep underground experiments. This contribution presents predictions of the daily muon flux at a depth of 2000 m.w.e., calculated using MUTE, a software tool which combines MCEq, a numerical solver of the matrix cascade equations in the atmosphere, with PROPOSAL, a propagation code for leptons in matter. The flux estimates are obtained assuming different cosmic-ray flux and hadronic interaction models. The results are compared to previous approaches, based on different methods, to calculate seasonal variations of atmospheric muons in deep underground detectors.