Measurement of Neutral Current Coherent π⁰ Production In The NOvA Near Detector

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.