Measuring Electromagnetic Activity with the NOvA Test Beam

The NOvA experiment at Fermilab is a long-baseline accelerator neutrino

experiment designed to study and understand neutrinos through their flavor

oscillations between two functionally-identical detectors, a 300 ton Near Detector

and a 14 kton Far Detector separated by 809 km and placed 14 mrad off-axis to the

NuMI neutrino beam produced at Fermilab. NOvA has as its primary physics goals

to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy, to probe CP violation in the leptonic

sector, and to conduct precision measurements of the neutrino mixing parameters.

To help further NOvA's physics reach, the NOvA Test Beam program operates a

scaled-down 30-ton detector to measure charged particles found in the final state

of neutrino interactions, including electrons, muons, pions, kaons and protons.

These particles are identified and momentum-selected within a range of 0.3 to 2.0

GeV/c by a new tertiary beamline deployed at Fermilab. The Test Beam program

data will provide NOvA with improved understanding of the largest systematic

uncertainties impacting NOvA's analyses, including detector response and

calibration. In this talk, I will present the current status of the NOvA Test beam

program and discuss the tagging of electrons and positrons with the beamline,

along with preliminary results from detector measurements of their

electromagnetic activity.