Measuring Neutral-Current Neutral-Pion Cross Section on Argon in MicroBooNE*

MicroBooNE is a short-baseline liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) neutrino experiment at Fermilab built to explore the excess of low energy electromagnetic events observed by its predecessor, MiniBooNE. MicroBooNE is also measuring a wide-array of neutrino-argon scattering cross sections in service of this goal and to provide input to future LArTPC neutrino expeiriments. Neutral current (NC) neutral pions (π⁰) are the dominant background for exploring anomalies in the photon channel. As such, constraining the NCπ⁰ background is central to accurately characterizing the photon signal in MicroBooNE. Our analysis calculates the rate of NCπ⁰ events across kinematic variables and unfolds it into a truth level cross section that is generalizable for use in future LArTPC experiments by accounting for the effects of detector response and neutrino flux. In this talk, I will go over the components of our analysis, including data selection, unfolding methods, and a fake data study and provide its current status.