Speaker
Description
ICARUS is a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) neutrino experiment at Fermilab. Located ~600 m from the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) target, it serves as the far detector in the Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) Program. The primary objective of the SBN Program is to probe short-baseline neutrino oscillations motivated by anomalous electron-like event excesses observed in previous experiments. Achieving this goal requires precise reconstruction of electron neutrino interactions and their associated electromagnetic showers. Neutral pions, which predominantly decay to photon pairs, provide an intrinsic calibration source for constraining electromagnetic shower energy scale and constitute a key background to electron neutrino appearance searches, motivating detailed measurements of their production in liquid argon. Reconstruction is performed using SPINE (Scalable Particle Imaging with Neural Embeddings), a state-of-the-art machine learning–based framework that provides fully automated, end-to-end event reconstruction. We present the progress of a measurement of charged-current muon neutrino interactions with a single neutral pion in the final state in the ICARUS detector. Comparisons of data and Monte Carlo simulation are carried out to evaluate reconstruction performance and to assess the modeling of neutral pion production. Single-differential cross sections are extracted as functions of muon and neutral pion kinematic observables. These results highlight the capability of SPINE to enable consistent, high-precision measurements of neutrino interactions in liquid argon with direct relevance to oscillation searches within the SBN Program.