Speakers
Description
NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment intended to resolve
oscillation parameters by comparing the relative probabilities of electron neu-
trino and antineutrino appearance as well as muon neutrino and antineutrino
disappearance over a 500-mile baseline. Precise measurement of the oscillation
parameters requires accurately inferring energy and flavor from neutrino inter-
actions with nuclear targets in the NOvA Near and Far Detectors (ND and FD),
but the precision of the inference is limited by the uncertainty of the model that
describes these interactions. Since its first analysis, the NOvA collaboration
has used and modified output from the GENIE event generator to appropri-
ately simulate neutrino interactions with nuclear targets; however, GENIE has
continuously evolved and been upgraded, forcing NOvA to periodically review
and update its model adjustments and procedures. The most recent GENIE
version introduces a standardized model selection mechanism embedded in a
model code known as a Comprehensive Model Configuration (CMC), which can
be used as a standardized way of documenting cross-section model variations by
experiment. The latest, and likely last, version of the NOvA Cross-Section
Model, Version 3, was declared in 2024 as N24_20i_02_11b and is built on a
change to the current DUNE standard CMC AR23_20i_00_000. In this talk,
the details of the change to the nuclear initial state and the implementation
of NuSystematics, the DUNE systematic uncertainty calculation software in
NOvARwgt, the NOvA reweighting software, will be reviewed.