Speaker
Description
NOvA is a long-baseline, two-detector, accelerator-based neutrino experiment at FERMILAB. It studies neutrino properties which are too complicated to be directly extracted from data, therefore needing to compare the data to a simulation as close to the real world as possible. The basis of this simulation is the prediction of the neutrino beam, which in NOvA's case is created by colliding accelerated protons onto a carbon target, producing hadrons which decay into neutrinos. It is currently practically impossible to predict these processes directly from theory, requiring us to use phenomenological models, which often need to be tuned to experimental data for specific cases. NOvA currently uses the Geant4 particle generator to simulate the production of the neutrino beam and corrects it using data from external experiments like NA49 and MIPP. I will present my work which focuses on adding another set of data from the NA61 (SHINE) experiment at SPS at CERN, to get a more precise prediction of the neutrino beam. This will be very helpful to experiment DUNE, the follow-up neutrino experiment to NOvA, currently in preparation/building.