Neutrino Induced Neutral Current Coherent $\pi^0$ Production in The NOvA Near Detector
The NOvA experiment is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment designed to measure the rate of electron neutrinos appearance in a muon neutrino beam. It consists of two finely segmented, liquid scintillator detectors at 14 mrad off-axis in the NuMI beam. The NOvA Near Detector, located at Fermilab, provides an excellent opportunity to study neutrino-nucleus interactions which are important for neutrino oscillation measurements. This presentation will present one of the first such measurements from NOvA: neutrino-induced coherent-$\pi^0$ production. Neutrinos can coherently interact with the target nucleus via neutral current exchange and produce a single, forward $\pi^0$ , which makes background to the $\nu_e$ appearance measurement. This analysis aims to measure the coherent-$\pi^0$ kinematics and cross-section and compare to model predictions, and thusly also provide a data constraint on $\pi^0$ production in the neutral current resonance and deep-inelastic interaction.