Muon-induced background study for underground laboratories

Abstract

We provide a comprehensive study of the cosmic-ray muon flux and induced activity as a function of overburden along with a convenient parametrization of the salient fluxes and differential distributions for a suite of underground laboratories ranging in depth from $\sim 1$ to 8 km.w.e.. Particular attention is given to the muon-induced fast neutron activity for the underground sites and we develop a depth-sensitivity relation to characterize the effect of such background in experiments searching for WIMP dark matter and neutrinoless double-beta decay.