Simulations of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays propagation

We compare two techniques for simulation of the propagation of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECR) in intergalactic space: the Monte Carlo approach and a method based on solving transport equations in one dimension. For the former, we adopt the publicly available tool CRPropa and for the latter, we use the code TransportCR, which has been developed by the first author and used in a number of applications, and is made available online with publishing this paper. While the CRPropa code is more universal, the transport equation solver has the advantage of a roughly 100 times higher calculation speed. We conclude that the methods give practically identical results for proton or neutron primaries if some accuracy improvements are introduced to the CRPropa code.