Electromagnetic Shower from Cosmic Muons in NOvA Detector
NO$\nu$A (NuMI Off-Axis $\nu_e$ Appearance) experiment is a neutrino $\nu_\mu \rightarrow \nu_e$ oscillation experiment with a baseline of 810 km. The signature for a $\nu_\mu \rightarrow \nu_e$ oscillation in the far detector is the production of an electromagnetic (EM) shower due to the charge current (CC) interaction of $\nu_e$ with the detector material. Cosmic muon induced electromagnetic showers can serve as a source of EM shower sample that can be used as a data-driven method for validating the EM shower modelling and EM shower identification algorithms at NO$\nu$A. The work reported in the thesis is the first ever implementation of cosmic muon induced EM shower for such a purpose in the NO$\nu$A experiment. We extracted EM shower sample from two sources - muon undergoing bremsstrahlung (Brem) and muon decay in flight to electron (DiF). Brem sample, extracted from cosmic muon, turns out to be a very useful data-driven method for testing EM shower modelling and the part icle identification (PID) algorithms for the detection of $\nu_e$-CC interactions. A new muon removal (MR) technique is developed and applied to remove the muon hits inside the bremsstrahlung shower. However, a complete removal of the muon energy in the event is not possible with high efficiency. DiF induced EM shower, on the other hand, is exactly similar to $\nu_e$-CC EM shower because DiF is a pure electron initiated EM shower. Therefore, DiF EM shower, once extracted, mimicks the shower of a $\nu_e$-CC interaction event. We present the extraction methods for both brem and DiF events in MC and cosmic data in far and near detector of NO$\nu$A and its use in data driven validation of $\nu_e$ EM shower modelling and $\nu_e$ signal selection efficiency across the detector. A systematic uncertainty is also assigned on $\nu_e$ appearance signal selection based on this study to take into account the difference in EM shower modelling in data and MC.