Description:

In the standard model, neutrinos are massless. Nowadays, indications of neutrinos with mass get steadily more striking. One of the main approaches to determine the neutrino mass is based on the principle of neutrino oscillations, which proves that neutrinos have mass via the violation of the lepton  number conservation. Experiments which exploit this principle can be classifsed via the corresponding source of neutrinos. The sun, the atmosphere of the earth and reactor facilities are often used as neutrino sources. The most striking indications yet for neutrino oscillations were given by the Super-Kamiokande collaboration in Japan via the investigation of the atmospheric neutrino  Although these results give signifcant evidence for neutrino oscillations, a direct proof or distinction from other explanations of the  deviations can not be given, due to the limited detector resolution of the Super-Kamiokande detector. Therefore, a new approach to investigate atmospheric neutrino oscillations is proposed by the MONOLITH collaboration (Massive Observatory for Neutrino O scillations or LImits on THeir existence). The proposed MONOLITH detector consists of a massive (34 kt) magnetized tracking calorimeter and is optimized for detecting atmospheric muon neutrinos. A direct measurement of the pattern of atmospheric neutrino oscillations can be performed with a sufficient resolution to distinguish the explanation of the  deviations via the neutrino oscillations mechanism from other explanations.