Searching for Dark Matter at the Nova Neutrino Experiment

The NOvA experiment (NuMI Off axis Neutrino Appearance) has the primary function of producing a muon neutrino beam, which travels through the Earth's crust, where some of the neutrinos will have oscillated to be detected as electron neutrinos at the Far Detector (FD). This is achieved by colliding 120GeV protons on a target, with an integrated luminosity of ~10²¹ Protons on Target (POT), producing pions which in turn decay into muons and a muon neutrino beam. In addition to muon neutrinos, there could be a beam of scalar Dark Matter (DM) hiding in the same data beneath a background of neutrino-electron scattering events. We present a well motivated analysis with world leading sensitivity to a forward electron signal from MeV range DM-electron scattering in NOvA's Near Detector (ND). We present the current observed limit on the coupling to the Standard Model (SM) using part of the available data, world leading in the 11 to 19 MeV DM mass range, and look to the next step of including more data to improve the sensitivity and statistics.