The Nucifer experiment: reactor antineutrino detection for reactor monitoring

During the last decades, tremendous progresses have been achieved on the fundamental knowledge and detection of neutrinos which give new opportunities of applied neutrino physics. Among them, antineutrinos could be exploited for two nuclear reactor monitoring applications: the thermal power measurement and the control of the isotopic composition of the reactor fuel. This application arouses the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) interest as a potential new safeguard tool. The Nucifer detector, under development in France, will be dedicated to applied neutrino physics. The design of the detector takes advantage of the technical improvements performed for fundamental neutrino experiments such as Double Chooz. Nucifer will be tested within the next two years at the OSIRIS (Saclay-France) and the ILL (Grenoble-France) research reactors. After an brief overview on the worldwide effort in the field of reactor monitoring with antineutrinos, the Nucifer experiment is presented, as well as Monte-Carlo PWR and CANDU reactor simulations and the method to compute the antineutrino energy spectrum using nuclear databases. The expected response of the Nucifer detector to diversion scenarios in PWR and CANDU reactors is shown.