Subsystem Development for the LISA mission to detect Gravitational Waves

The detection of Gravitational Waves will mark the opening of a new window on the universe as well as a major step in the understanding of gravity. Gravitational Waves are the incredibly tiny ripples in spacetime caused by violrent motions of masses far distant in the universe. they were predicted by Albert Einstein nealry 90 years ago as a by product of his revised theory of gravity, General Relativity. Serious attempts are being made to detect them using very large ground based detectors in te US and in Europe but these serach for waves at frequencies in the range ten to ten thousand Hertz, roughly the frequency range of music from a piano. Such frequencies are only possible from relatively small astronomical objects, on the order of a few tens of kilometres. Larger objects such as massive black holes generate much lower frequencies, too low to detect against the noisy environment on Earth in that frequency range. Space borne detectors such as LISA will be required to detect such objects. This proposal is for a three year period of technology development to prepare the technology which will enable the LISA project to detect and observe gravitational waves in the frequency range from 0.1 milli Hertz to 100 milli Hertz.