Measuring Neutral Current Neutral Pion Cross Sections in MicroBooNE*

Multiple neutrino experiments in the recent past found unexplained excesses in electromagnetic events that remain unresolved to this day. The reason behind these excesses could lead to new physics discoveries including new types of neutrinos and connections to the dark sector. The Micro-Booster Neutrino Experiment that ran from 2015 to 2021 at Fermilab aims to study these excesses. One of the dominating backgrounds to electromagnetic signals stem from neutral current neutral pions. These decay into two gamma rays. When they are reconstructed poorly, they can resemble lone photons. This makes it hard to reduce the background and find the source of the excess. This work focused on developing a selection of two photons final state events to extract the neutral current neutral pion production cross section. The results indicate good agreement between simulated data and prediction, building confidence in the modeling of this important background process.