The STEREO experiment is a very short baseline reactor antineutrino experiment. It is designed to test the hypothesis of light sterile neutrinos being the cause of a deficit of the observed antineutrino interaction rate at short baselines with respect to the predicted rate, known as the reactor antineutrino anomaly. The STEREO experiment measures the antineutrino energy spectrum in six identical detector cells covering baselines between 9 and 11 m from the compact core of the ILL research reactor. In this article, results from 179 days of reactor turned on and 235 days of reactor turned off are reported at a high degree of detail. The current results include improvements in the modelling of detector optical properties and the γ-cascade after neutron captures by gadolinium, the treatment of backgrounds, and the statistical method of the oscillation analysis. Using a direct comparison between antineutrino spectra of all cells, largely independent of any flux prediction, we find the data compatible with the null oscillation hypothesis. The best-fit point of the reactor antineutrino anomaly is rejected at more than 99.9% C.L.

The Stereo experiment is a very short baseline reactor antineutrino experiment. It is designed to test the hypothesis of light sterile neutrinos being the cause of a deficit of the observed antineutrino interaction rate at short baselines with respect to the predicted rate, known as the Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly. The Stereo experiment measures the antineutrino energy spectrum in six identical detector cells covering baselines between 9 and 11 m from the compact core of the ILL research reactor. In this article, results from 179 days of reactor turned on and 235 days of reactor turned off are reported in unprecedented detail. The current results include improvements in the description of the optical model of the detector, the gamma-cascade after neutron captures by gadolinium, the treatment of backgrounds, and the statistical method of the oscillation analysis. Using a direct comparison between antineutrino interaction rates of all cells, independent of any flux prediction, we find the data compatible with the null oscillation hypothesis. The best-fit point of the Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly is rejected at more than 99.9 % C.L.

We report the first confirmation of the predicted inversion between the 2p 3=2 and 1f 5=2 nuclear states in the g 9=2 midshell. This was achieved at the ISOLDE facility, by using a combination of insource laser spectroscopy and collinear laser spectroscopy on the ground states of 71;73;75 Cu, which measured the nuclear spin and magnetic moments. Much of the current effort in nuclear physics is focused on determining how the nuclear shell structure is changing in neutron-rich nuclei. This has been triggered by the observation of unexpected phenomena in several neutronrich isotopes, since radioactive ion beams of such nuclei became available more than three decades ago. In the lighter elements (e.g., He, Li, Be), neutron halos and skins were observed. Around the neutron-rich 32 Mg region an ''island of inversion'' was discovered. In the neutron-rich region towards doubly magic 78 Ni, a sudden drop in the position of the first excited 5=2 À state in 71;73 Cu isotopes was observed more than a decade ago [1]. The lowering of the 5=2 À energy from above 1 MeV in 69 Cu to 166 keV in 73 Cu suggested that this state might become the ground state in 75 Cu. The migration of this level, associated with the occupation of the 1f 5=2 single-particle orbital, was attributed to a strong attractive monopole interaction that becomes active when neutrons occupy the 1g 9=2 orbital [2]. Such monopole interactions exist also in near-stable nuclei, but their impact on the evolution of shell structure and shell gaps in far-from-stability nuclei remained unnoticed until recently [3]. Also in other neutron-rich regions dramatic monopole shifts were observed when valence neutrons and protons are occupying orbits having their orbital and spin angular momentum, respectively, aligned and antialigned. It is now understood that one of the physics mechanisms driving these monopole shifts is the tensor part of the residual nucleon-nucleon interaction [4]. A steep lowering of the 1=2 À level from about 1 MeV in 69 Cu down to 135 keV in 73 Cu has also been observed [5,6]. Thus this level is also a potential ground-state candidate in 75 Cu. While most shell-model interactions do reproduce a lowering of the 5=2 À level and predict an inversion with the normal 3=2 À ground state somewhere between 73 Cu and 79 Cu [4,[7][8][9][10], none of them reproduce the lowering of the 1=2 À state. Some significant physics mechanism is either omitted or seriously underestimated in each of the recently developed shell-model interactions. Therefore, experimental establishment of ground-and excited-state nuclear spins and the properties of their wave function (through spectroscopic factors, magnetic moments, transition moments, etc.) is a crucial step in PRL 103,

A: The S experiment is a very short baseline reactor antineutrino experiment aiming at testing the hypothesis of light sterile neutrinos as an explanation of the deficit of the observed neutrino interaction rate with respect to the predicted rate, known as the Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly. The detector center is located 10 m away from the compact, highly 235 U enriched core of the research nuclear reactor of the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble, France. This paper describes the S site, the detector components and associated shielding designed to suppress the external sources of background which were characterized on site. It reports the performances in terms of detector response and energy reconstruction.