Probing muon neutrino charged current interactions with a proton and a neutral pion in final state at the NOvA Near Detector

NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino experiment at Fermilab that studies neutrino oscillations via electron neutrino appearance and muon neutrino disappearance. The NOvA Near Detector, located about 1 km from the Fermilab NuMI beam, records a high rate of neutrino interactions in the energy range of 1-5 GeV. This high statistics dataset provides the opportunity to probe various neutrino interaction processes, including resonant and non-resonant interactions where neutral pions are produced. This talk presents studies for an exclusive channel selection where the final state contains a muon, neutral pion, and proton. The reconstruction of protons is novel for the NOvA experiment and this talk details progress towards the selection of this final state alongside a proton momentum estimator, in order to measure the cross section as a function of individual particle kinematics and transverse kinematic imbalance variables, including missing transverse momentum.