Detection of Galactic Supernova Neutrinos at the NOvA Experiment

Core-collapse supernovae emit about 99% of their gravitational energy in a burst of neutrinos. Detecting such a neutrino signal would provide a valuable information both on the neutrino properties and on the stellar collapse physics. The large liquid scintillator detectors used in the NOvA experiment provide a possibility to detect such a signal. A dedicated trigger system was developed for NOvA to perform the search of inverse beta decay neutrino interaction candidates in real time and is able to detect the supernova burst within ~seconds latency and save the data from detectors for further study. This system has been running in stable mode since November 2017. A parallel effort is on-going to develop background rejection and event selection techniques for an offline analysis of these neutrinos.