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.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure