Muon Monte Carlo: a new high-precision tool for tracking of muons in medium

Wolfgang Rhode (1) and Dmitry Chirkin (2)

	(1) Bergische Universitaet Gesamthochschuele Wuppertal, Germany
	(2) University of California at Berkeley, USA

Propagation of muons through large amounts of matter is a crucial necessity
for analysis of data produced by muon/neutrino underground experiments. A muon
may sustain hundreds of interactions before it is seen by the experiment.
Since a small uncertainty, introduced hundreds of times may lead to sizable
errors, requirements on the precision of the muon propagation code are very
stringent. A new tool for propagating of muon and tau leptons through matter
that is believed to meet these requirements is presented here. The latest
formulae available for the cross sections were used and the reduction of the
calculational errors to minimum was our top priority. The tool is a very
versatile program written in an object-oriented language environment (Java).
It supports many different optimization (parametrization) levels. Fully
parametrized version is as fast or even faster than the competition. On the
other hand, the slowest version of the program that does not make use of
parametrizations, is fast enough for many tasks if queuing or SYMPHONY
environments with large number of connected computers are used. An overview of
the program is given and the results of its application to the muon detectors
(AMANDA and Frejus) are discussed.