Measurement of Neutral Current Coherent ${\pi }^0$ Production In The NOvA Near Detector

Abstract

The NOvA experiment is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment designed to measure electron neutrino appearance in a muon neutrino beam. It consists of two finely segmented, liquid scintillator detectors at 14 mrad off-axis in the NuMI beam.The NOvA Near Detector, located at Fermilab, provides an excellent opportunity to study neutrino-nucleus interactions which are important for the neutrino oscillation measurements. This talk will present one of the first such measurements from the NOvA Near Detector: neutral current coherent-${\pi }^0$ production. Neutrinos can coherently interact with the target nucleus via neutral current exchange and produce a single, forward ${\pi }^0$, which is a background to the ${\nu }_e$ appearance measurement. This analysis measures the coherent- ${\pi }^0$ kinematics and cross-section and compares it to the model predictions. A data-driven method is developed to constrain the neutral current resonance and deep-inelastic ${\pi }^0$ productions which are background to this analysis.

Talk presented at the APS Division of Particles and Fields Meeting (DPF 2017), July 31-August 4, 2017, Fermilab. C170731