SMAUG v1.0 – a user-friendly muon simulator for the imaging of geological objects in 3-D

Abstract

Abstract. Knowledge about muon tomography has spread in recent years in the geoscientific community and several collaborations between geologists and physicists have been founded. As the data analysis is still mostly done by particle physicists, much of the know-how is concentrated in particle physics and specialised geophysics institutes. SMAUG (Simulation for Muons and their Applications UnderGround), a toolbox consisting of several modules that cover the various aspects of data analysis in a muon tomographic experiment, aims at providing access to a structured data analysis framework. The goal of this contribution is to make muon tomography more accessible to a broader geoscientific audience. In this study, we show how a comprehensive geophysical model can be built from basic physics equations. The emerging uncertainties are dealt with by a probabilistic formulation of the inverse problem, which is finally solved by a Monte Carlo Markov chain algorithm. Finally, we benchmark the SMAUG results against those of a recent study, which, however, have been established with an approach that is not easily accessible to the geoscientific community. We show that they reach identical results with the same level of accuracy and precision.