Muon Monte Carlo: a high-precision tool for muon propagation through matter

An accurate simulation of the propagation of muons through large amounts of matter is needed for the analysis of data produced by muon/neutrino underground experiments. A muon may sustain hundreds of interactions before it is detected 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 muon and tau charged leptons through matter that is believed to meet these requirements is presented here. The latest formulae available for the interaction cross sections were used and the reduction of calculational errors to a minimum was the top priority. The tool is a very versatile program written in an object-oriented language environment (Java). It supports many different optimization (parametrization) levels. The fully parametrized version is as fast or even faster than the counterparts. On the other hand, the slowest version of the program, which does not make use of parameterizations, is fast enough for many tasks if queuing or distributed environments with large numbers of connected computers are used. In this work, an overview of the program is given and some results of its application are discussed