Study of Charged Current Neutral Pion Production in the T2K Near Detector

T2K is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment based at the J-PARC research facility in eastern Japan. The main systematic uncertainties dominating the neutrino oscillation analyses for T2K are related to the beam flux, cross-section and final state interaction uncertainties. Within this thesis, a first attempt is made to develop an analysis to reconstruct charged-current single neutral-pion interactions within the tracking detector region of the T2K near detector.
The analysis presented is divided into six topologies and produces a selection efficiency, over all the event topologies of interest, of 9.6% with 12.1% purity. When considering the most effective selection topology, labelled FGD2DsDs, an efficiency of 9.4% with purity of 22.6% is achieved. This leads to a FGD2DsDs Monte-Carlo prediction of 58.5 ± 3.5 (stat.) ± 15.4 (syst.) events being selected across the T2K Run 2, Run 3 and Run 4 data taking periods, with a total of 58 events being selected within the real data.
With further development in the future, it is expected that the presented analysis will contribute towards the data samples used to constrain the T2K experiment oscillation analysis and lead to a CC1pi0 final state cross-section measurement.