Nucifer: A small electron-antineutrino detector for fundamental and safeguard studies

The Nucifer detector will be deployed in the next few months at the Osiris research reactor in France. Nucifer is a 1-ton Gd-doped liquid scintillator detector devoted to reactor antineutrino studies. It will be installed 7 m away from the compact core of the Osiris reactor. The design of such small volume detector has been focused on high detection efficiency and good background rejection. Over the last decades, our understanding of the neutrino properties has been improved and allows today the possibility to apply the detection of antineutrinos to automatic and to non intrusively survey nuclear power plant. This has triggered the interest of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is interested by developing new safeguard techniques for next generation reactors. The sensitivity of such technique has to be proved and demonstrated. On the other hand there is still some issues in our understanding of the neutrino properties as the observed deficit in the antineutrino rate at short distances (< 100 m) that can not be explained by oscillations in the 3-flavors neutrino model. If a global systematic error is rejected, such anomaly opens the door to new physic that can be assessed with small detectors placed close to the core. Here we review the Nucifer detector in this context and the tests we are performing. (authors)