Lay, Henry and Blake, Andrew (2025) Preparing for Precision: Neutral-Current Neutral Pion Production in the Short-Baseline Near Detector. PhD thesis, Physics.
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Abstract
Precision measurements of neutrino interaction cross sections will be of critical importance to the next generation of neutrino oscillation experiments. The Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND) is a 112 ton Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber experiment in the Booster Neutrino Beam at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. It will collect the largest ever dataset of neutrino-argon interactions with which it will pursue a rich cross section measurement program. This thesis presents the development of a number of tools for the reconstruction and analysis of this data to prepare SBND for precision measurements. The ability of SBND to make a measurement of the challenging NC 1π0 channel is then explored. This channel is of particular interest due to its similar signature to the charged-current electron neutrino interactions that represent the signal of interest in the MiniBooNE and LSND low energy excess. SBND will investigate this excess as part of the Short-Baseline Neutrino program. Powerful selections reduce the background to this channel by over 99 %, whilst retaining 34 % of the signal. A method for extracting the interaction cross section is then developed, including an assessment of a range of systematic uncertainties associated with the simulation chain. By comparing the extracted cross section from a sample of simulated SBND data to the raw predictions from a couple of different generator models, it is clear that significant differences will be resolvable with SBND data. Critical further work is detailed that will enable full exploitation of the generational advancement in precision measurements of neutrino-argon interaction cross sections possible with SBND.