Status of muon antineutrino charged-current neutral-pion production differential cross-section measurement in the NOvA near detector

NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment primarily designed to measure the muon (anti)neutrino disappearance and electron (anti)neutrino appearance in the off-axis Fermilab NuMI beam. It uses two functionally identical liquid scintillator detectors separated by 810 km and a narrow band beam centered around 2 GeV. Energetic neutral pions produced in Δ resonance and deep-inelastic interactions are a significant background to the electron (anti)neutrino appearance measurement as the photons coming from neutral pion decay may be misidentified as an electron(positron). The high statistics antineutrino mode data in the near detector (ND) can be used to perform a measurement of the cross-section for muon antineutrino charged-current (CC) neutral-pion production. The analysis uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on individually simulated particles to identify neutral pions in the final state. The status of the analysis and preliminary sensitivities will be presented.