Study of quasi-elastic scattering in the NOvA detector prototype

Abstract

NOvA is a 810 km long base-line neutrino oscillation experiment with two detectors (far 14 KTon and near detector 300 Ton) currently being installed in the NUMI off-axis neutrino beam produced at Fermilab. A 222 Ton prototype NOvA detector (NDOS) was built and operated in the neutrino beam for over a year to understand the response of the detector and its construction. The goal of this thesis is to study the muon neutrino interaction data collected in this test, specifically the identification of quasi-elastic charged-current interactions and measure the behavior of the quasi-elastic muon neutrino cross section. This thesis presents the analysis of the data from two detector configurations, the first configuration collected data from 1e19 protons on target (POT) from April to May 2011 and the second configuration collected data from 1.7e20POT from October 2011 to April 2012. The charged current quasi-elastic muon neutrino events collected with each configuration were analyzed to extract the cross section as a function of energy as well as the single differential cross sections with respect to outgoing muon momentum, outgoing muon angle from the incident neutrino direction; and the momentum dP, and transfer squared of the interaction.