Current Status of the Inclusive Neutral Current $\pi^{0}$ Production Cross section Measurement with the NOvA Near Detector

The NOvA (NuMI Off-axis $\nu_{e}$ Appearance) experiment is designed to study long-baseline neutrino oscillations. It uses two detectors, the NOvA near detector (ND) at Fermilab and the NOvA far detector (FD) at a distance 810 km in northern Minnesota. NOvA measures the rate of $\nu_{e}$ appearance at the FD using a narrow-band $\nu_{\mu}$ beam peaked at 2 GeV in energy. Neutral Current (NC) interactions with a $\pi^{0}$ in the final state are a significant background in the $\nu_{e}$ appearance measurement. The $\pi^{0}$ decay into two photons can fake the $\nu_{e}$ appearance signal either due to merging of two photon showers or one of the two photons escaping the detection. Therefore, a complete understanding of NC interactions with $\pi^{0}$ in the final state is very important. It will also help in reducing the background uncertainties for current and future long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments. We present the status of the analysis related to the inclusive NC $\pi^{0}$ production cross section measurement with the NOvA ND. A multivariate event identification algorithm is used to select the NC $\pi^{0}$ events of interest and the selection criteria are optimized by minimizing the fractional uncertainty on the total cross section.