SPEAKER: Maria Martinez-Casales – Iowa State University – TITLE: Constraining neutrino interaction incertainties for oscillation measurements in NOvA

This is an IN-PERSON Event

Location: Sessler Conference Room – 50A-5132

TITLE: Constraining neutrino interaction incertainties for oscillation measurements in NOvA

ABSTRACT:

The NuMI Off-Axis Neutrino Appearance (NOvA) experiment is an 810 km baseline neutrino oscillation experiment measuring the fundamental properties of neutrinos and antineutrinos, using the high statistics data from the Near Detector (ND) at Fermilab to produce predictions for the Far Detector (FD) in Minnesota. The expected neutrino spectrum is simulated using GENIE, with the neutrino cross section model adjusted to better describe the ND data by modifying the rate of Meson Exchange Current (MEC) interactions and the Final State Interactions. In measurements published so far, NOvA has compared the Far Detector data to an energy spectrum obtained from a data-driven prediction method based Near Detector (ND) data called extrapolation. This talk presents an alternate approach that directly constrains physics model parameters in the NOvA simulation using the ND data. The neutrino and antineutrino simulation is divided into subsets based on the multiplicity and topology of visible particles. These samples have meaningful features that are used to constrain the neutrino interaction model and flux parameters using Poisson maximum likelihood fitting procedure. This work shows the fitting method effectively constrains the model uncertainties with pseudodata generated by randomly varying physics parameters in the ND simulation. This is an initial step towards achieving a full analysis that includes the physics model parameters constraint from the ND data fit to measure the neutrino oscillation parameters.