Electron Energy Response Measurement in the NOvA Test Beam Detector

The NuMI Off-Axis Electron Neutrino Appearance (NOvA) experiment is a long-baseline accelerator-based neutrino experiment hosted by Fermilab. A 300 ton Near Detector and a 14 kton Far Detector, functionally-identical detectors located 809 km apart and placed 14 mrad off-axis to Fermilab’s NuMI (Neutrino at the Main Injector) neutrino beam, are designed to study and describe neutrino properties through their flavor oscillations. NOvA’s primary physics goals are to determine the neutrino mass ordering, investigate CP violation in the lepton sector, and conduct precision measurements of the neutrino mixing parameters. In order to help further NOvA's physics reach, the NOvA Test Beam program was operated to measure the charged particles produced in the neutrino interactions. The Test Beam Detector, a scaled down 30-ton detector equipped with both Far Detector and Near Detector technologies, was employed to study the electrons, protons, pions, muons, and kaons for an improved understanding of the largest systematic uncertainties that impact NOvA’s analyses. These charged particles were identified and momentum-selected within a range of 0.3 - 2.0 GeV/c by a tertiary beamline at Fermilab and analyzing them is necessary to characterize the detector response and calibration. In this talk, I will discuss the tagging of electrons and positrons with the beamline along with the preliminary results on the energy response obtained from the detector measurements of their electromagnetic activities.