Towards a First Measurement of Neutral Current Coherent-like Neutral Pion Production with the MicroBooNE Detector

Neutrinos are abundant particles that play a vital role within the Standard Model (SM), yet are still not well understood. Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics is probed with the MicroBooNE neutrino detector at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL). This experiment utilizes a Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC), a novel neutrino detection technique that will be deployed in other upcoming neutrino experiments such as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). MicroBooNE tests different interpretations of the source of the anomalous MiniBooNE low-energy excess, including both SM neutrino and BSM explanations. Certain BSM scenarios predict final-state signatures which include forward-going neutral pions. However, neutral current coherent-like (NCCOH-like) events also have forward-going neutral pions in their topology, effectively mimicking BSM signatures. This makes it important to be able to identify NCCOH-like events in order to model their contribution and effectively reject these interactions in BSM analyses. We perform the first study of such events in a liquid argon detector, developing a selection that can determine the presence of a NCCOH-like event on MicroBooNE data.