Study of Low-Q² Resonance Suppression to Reduce Systematic Uncertainties on NOvA Experimental Results
The neutrino experiment NOvA compares Monte Carlo (MC) generated events from the program GENIE to data found experimentally from the detector located at Fermilab. Since the default values of GENIE don’t adequately describe the data, weights are added to certain neutrino interactions to improve agreement with data. One of these interactions are called resonant interactions, and in this study we evaluate the use of different weights to resonant interactions to improve data-MC agreement. Since resonant interaction disagreement in low-Q² (four momentum) is one of the largest systematic uncertainties in NOvA cross sections, we study these weights with the goal of reducing the uncertainty associated with resonant interactions. Various weights are applied to previous GENIE data sets and compared to the current data set to construct a resonant systematic to be used in the 2020 NOvA analysis.