Speaker
Description
The NOvA experiment is a two-detectors, long-baseline neutrino experiment operating since 2014 in the NuMI muon neutrino beam (FNAL, USA). NOvA has already collected about 25% of its expected statistics in both neutrino and antineutrino modes for electron-neutrino appearance and muon-neutrino disappearance analyses. Careful simulation of neutrino events and backgrounds are required for precise measurements of the neutrino oscillation parameters. We will describe updates in the NOvA simulation chain in comparison to previous one presented at CHEP2015, including: a revision of the detector geometries, upgrading the GENIE neutrino event generator to access an array of 2p2h models, upgrading GEANT to improve neutron modeling, modifying our custom electronic simulation package to model energy dependent shaping changes, improvements to our fiber and scintillator light models, and modifications to the overlay procedure to allow for mixing cosmic ray data with simulated neutrino events as well as enhanced realism in the addition of beam-related activity from outside the detector to the detector simulation.
