Study of NOvA TestBeam Detector Response for Protons

Name: Bishnu Acharya

Study of NOvA TestBeam Detector Response for Protons 

The NOvA (NuMI Off-Axis ??e Appearance) Experiment is a long-baseline accelerator neutrino experiment in Fermilab. It consists of two functionally identical detectors, a 300 ton Near Detector (ND) at Fermilab, 1 km from the beam source, and a 14kton Far Detector (FD) in Ash River, Minnesota, 810 km’s away from the source, both placed 14 mrad off-axis with respect to the neutrino beam. The primary goals of this experiment are to determine the neutrino mass ordering, perform precision measurements of the neutrino mixing parameters, including investigation of possible CP violation in the lepton sector, through the study of (anti)neutrino flavor oscillations.

Because systematic uncertainties have a strong impact on measurement of the oscillation parameters, the NOvA Test Beam program was established to measure detector response of charged particles ( electrons, protons, pions and kaons) to reduce some of the dominant uncertainties. The NOvA Test Beam Detector was a scaled down 30 ton detector equipped with both FD and ND technologies. NOvA has historically seen Data/MC discrepancy in the proton dE/dx distribution. In this talk, I will discuss how I am exploring this discrepancy using TestBeam protons including some preliminary results.