The steadily increasing luminosity of the LHC requires an upgrade with high-rate and high-resolution detector technology for the inner end cap of the ATLAS muon spectrometer: the New Small Wheels (NSW). In order to achieve the goal of precision tracking at a hit rate of about 15 kHz/cm2 at the inner radius of the NSW, large area Micromegas quadruplets with 100 µm spatial resolution per plane have been produced. IRFU, from the CEA research center of Saclay, is responsible for the production and validation of LM1 Micromegas modules. The construction, production, qualification and validation of the largest Micromegas detectors ever built are reported here. Performance results under cosmic muon characterization will also be discussed.

We report on the performance of the MINOS Time Projection Chamber developed as a vertex tracker to study exotic nuclei produced from hydrogen-induced knockout via in-beam gamma-ray and invariant-mass spectroscopy. Inbeam measurements with He-4 and Ne-20 beams at 200 and 350 MeV/nucleon, respectively, were performed at the HIMAC facility. The tracking algorithm for protons after quasi-free scattering is described. Realistic simulations and physics experiments are compared and show a good agreement. The vertex position resolution reaches 5 mm FWHM, mostly from re-scattering with the target and the Aluminum reaction chamber. The overall efficiency of vertex reconstruction is also benchmarked with the first experimental campaign data performed at the RIBF, confirming an overall efficiency better than 90% for physics experiments.

The STEREO 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 ^235U enriched core of the research nuclear reactor of the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble, France. This paper describes the STEREO 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.

Originally designed as a new nuclear reactor monitoring device, the Nucifer detector has successfully detected its first neutrinos. We provide the second shortest baseline measurement of the reactor neutrino flux. The detection of electron antineutrinos emitted in the decay chains of the fission products, combined with reactor core simulations, provides an new tool to assess both the thermal power and the fissile content of the whole nuclear core and could be used by the Inter- national Agency for Atomic Energy (IAEA) to enhance the Safeguards of civil nuclear reactors. Deployed at only 7.2m away from the compact Osiris research reactor core (70MW) operating at the Saclay research centre of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), the experiment also exhibits a well-suited configuration to search for a new short baseline oscillation. We report the first results of the Nucifer experiment, describing the performances of the 0.85m3 detector remotely operating at a shallow depth equivalent to 12m of water and under intense background radiation conditions. Based on 145 (106) days of data with reactor ON (OFF), leading to the detection of an estimated 40760 electron antineutrinos, the mean number of detected antineutrinos is 281 +- 7(stat) +- 18(syst) electron antineutrinos/day, in agreement with the prediction 277(23) electron antineutrinos/day. Due the the large background no conclusive results on the existence of light sterile neutrinos could be derived, however. As a first societal application we quantify how antineutrinos could be used for the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement.

MINOS is a new apparatus dedicated to in-beam nuclear structure experiments with low-intensity exotic beams in inverse kinematics at intermediate energies above 150MeV/nucleon. The device is composed of a thick liquid-hydrogen target coupled to a compact time projection chamber (TPC) serving as a vertex tracker. Either used for in-beam gamma spectroscopy of bound excited states or invariant-mass spectroscopy of unbound states, MINOS aims at improving the luminosity by a very significant factor compared to standard solid-target material experiments while improving experimental resolutions.

The MINOS (MagIc Numbers Off Stability) collaboration has developed a compact vertex tracker for in-beam gamma spectroscopy of very exotic nuclei. It comprises a cylindrical time projection chamber with a Micromegas amplification plane, a cylindrical tracker based on a curved Micromegas, and two off-the-shelf silicon detectors. In total, MINOS comprises ~5000 channels. Besides performance goals, the readout electronics system was designed to be versatile and upgradable with minimal effort. The hardware part consists of three types of custom-made cards. The Feminos is a small digital board that can read out a front-end card equipped with AFTER chips (originally developed for the T2K neutrino experiment), or AGET chips, a pin-compatible evolution designed by the GET collaboration. Multiple Feminos are synchronized by a board called the trigger clock module, and are connected to a data acquisition PC through a Gigabit Ethernet switch. System configuration, monitoring and data acquisition rely on a generic object-oriented framework based on the ICE middleware, a free software infrastructure for distributed computing. After a brief description of the detectors of MINOS, we present the design and performance of the readout and data acquisition system of this instrument, and show some of the results obtained during their validation in an in-beam test recently performed at HIMAC, Chiba, Japan.