GENIUS - A new underground observatory for non-accelerator particle physics

The GENIUS (Germanium in Liquid Nitrogen Underground Setup) project has been proposed in 1997 [2] as first third generation double beta decay project, with a sensitivity aiming down to a level of an effective neutrino mass of < 0.01 eV or less. Such sensitivity is important to fix the structure of the neutrino mass matrix with high accuracy, which cannot be done by neutrino oscillation experiments alone. GENIUS will allow broad access also to many other topics of physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics at the multi-TeV scale. For search of cold dark matter GENIUS will cover a large part of the parameter space of predictions of SUSY for neutralinos as dark matter [4,8,9]. Finally, GENIUS has the potential to be a real-time detector for low-energy (pp and 7Be) solar neutrinos [5,9]. A GENIUS-Test Facility has just been funded and will come into operation by end of 2002