Short-Baseline Sterile Neutrino Searches with the NOvA Near Detector

Apparent short-baseline neutrino oscillations observed by the LSND and MiniBooNE experiments, and the deficit of events seen at the GALLEX and SAGE experiments, can be explained by the addition of sterile neutrino state with a mass at the 1eV level. These results are in tension with null results from other experiments. The NOvA Near Detector (ND) is a 293 ton fine-grained liquid-scintillator detector which may be able to clarify this situation by searching for sterile-driven oscillations of neutrinos from the NuMI beam over a 1 km baseline. This poster will highlight two short-baseline searches in the NOvA ND. The first looks for muon-neutrino disappearance and electron-neutrino appearance using neutrinos from the narrow-band beam peaked at 2 GeV. This analysis probes the L/E range where oscillations should occur if the LSND and MiniBooNE anomalies were due to sterile neutrinos. The second looks for tau-neutrino appearance in the secondary, high-energy beam peak due to kaon decays.