Supraja Balasubramanian

MicroBooNE is a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) on the Booster Neutrino Beam at Fermi National Laboratory. Its primary goals are to conduct a ν_e appearance search to investigate the nature of the anomalous low-energy excess of electromagnetic events observed by MiniBooNE, study neutrino-argon interactions, and conduct research and development for future large-scale argon based detectors such as DUNE. A significant background for MicroBooNE’s ν_e appearance measurement are photon showers from neutral pion decay, which can mimic the electromagnetic cascade signature of electrons from ν_e’s. Studying neutral pion production in the MicroBooNE detector provides the opportunity to better understand electromagnetic shower topologies in LArTPCs. Furthermore, conducting experimental neutrino-argon cross sections is crucial for constraining modeling systematics and calculating the neutrino energy and flux accurately for future accelerator-based neutrino oscillation experiments. This thesis presents a measurement of ν_μ charged current single π₀ differential production cross sections on argon in the MicroBooNE detector. This will be the first of its kind on argon.