Description
NOvA is a long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment with two functionally identical detectors that are 810 km apart and sit 14 mrad off-axis from the Fermilab NuMI Beam. NOvA measures electron neutrino appearance and muon neutrino disappearance at its Far Detector (FD) and uses its Near Detector (ND) to understand the characteristics of the beam and some important backgrounds to the FD measurements. The beam runs in two modes, neutrino or antineutrino dominated, where the latter has a high wrong-sign contamination from neutrinos. The appearance signal at the FD has three main backgrounds: charged-current muon neutrino, neutral current, and charged-current electron neutrino events. The ND observes the beam before oscillations can occur and provides us with a high statistics probe into the different FD background components including wrong-side contamination. NOvA uses data-driven methods to constrain the electron neutrino appearance backgrounds and estimate wrong-sign contamination. In my poster, I will present details of these methods using both the neutrino and antineutrino dominated modes of the NuMI beam.
| Collaboration | NOvA |
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