Studies of Neutral Current Neutrino-Nucleon Scattering with the MicroBooNE Detector

The MicroBooNE experiment is an 85 ton active volume liquid-argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) located in the Booster Neutrino Beamline at Fermilab. The excellent calorimetric and spatial resolution of the LArTPC allows us to identify isolated proton tracks with lengths as short as 2 cm, which is equivalent to proton kinetic energy T = 50 MeV. We report the progress towards the first measurement of muon neutrino neutral current elastic scattering from protons in Argon in the region of four-momentum transfer squared, 0.1 < Q² < 1 GeV², using MicroBooNE's 6.87 × 10²⁰ POT data. We also present our plan to extract the strange quark contribution to the axial form factor, which is crucial for understanding the strange quark contribution to the proton spin.