Predicting Neutron Production from Cosmic-ray Muons

TL;DR

This paper presents a new Monte Carlo simulation approach using FLUKA to accurately estimate neutron production from cosmic-ray muons, addressing previous inconsistencies in measurements and calculations for underground experiments.

Contribution

The authors develop a unified simulation method with FLUKA to predict neutron yield, spectrum, multiplicity, and angular distribution from cosmic muons, improving agreement with experimental data.

Findings

Good description of existing measurements after corrections

Addresses discrepancies in neutron production estimates

Provides a reliable tool for underground experiment backgrounds

Abstract

Fast neutrons from cosmic-ray muons are an important background to underground low energy experiments. The estimate of such background is often hampered by the difficulty of measuring and calculating neutron production with sufficient accuracy. Indeed substantial disagreement exists between the different analytical calculations performed so far, while data reported by different experiments is not always consistent. We discuss a new unified approach to estimate the neutron yield, the energy spectrum, the multiplicity and the angular distribution from cosmic muons using the Monte Carlo simulation package FLUKA and show that it gives a good description of most of the existing measurements once the appropriate corrections have been applied.