Progress of the Charged Pion Semi-inclusive Neutrino Charged Current Cross Section in NOvA

Abstract

The NOvA experiment is a long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment designed to measure the rates of electron neutrino appearance and muon neutrino disappearance. It uses the NuMI beam that has recently been upgraded to 700 kW as the neutrino beam source. The NOvA Near Detector (ND) is placed onsite at Fermilab, 800 m from the NuMI target while the far detector is placed 810 km away at a site near Ash River, Minnesota, both the detectors being functionally identical and 14.6 mrad off-axis w.r.t the NuMI beam. The primary physics goal of the experiment include precise measurement of \(\theta _{23}\), CP violating phase \(\delta _{CP}\) and the neutrino mass hierarchy. In addition to oscillation physics, the NOvA experiment provides an excellent opportunity to study neutrino-nucleus cross-sections at the ND as it is situated close to the neutrino source and observes an intense rate of neutrino interactions. This work is a proceeding to a talk showing the status of the charged pion production in muon neutrino introduced charged current interactions at the NOvA ND based on the exposure equivalent to \(8.85 \times 10^{20}\) for the neutrino beam using convolutional neural networks (CNN).