The entire £300,000 contract for production lighting and entertainment laser package for Millennium Square was won by Wakefield-based Futurist. It included the supply of Avolites control and dimming systems, together with Martin MAC 500 and 600 automated fixtures and an entire rig of theatrical lighting, cables and special effects equipment. However, the highlight of the Futurist contract was the supply and installation of eight laser systems, which use new diode technology. They offer Leeds City Centre Management Team a hugely flexible system that can be employed for pure entertainment purposes, projection of advertising for their own events and for income purposes via billboard-style applications, and the ability to use the system for creative expression within a cultural environment. Three control systems have been provided: one to run six lasers (multiplexed together) and two for the stage laser systems.
   Michael Lister, managing director of Futurist, takes up the story. "The equipment, which has been designed by Laser Electronics Limited, uses 2.5W DPSS (Diode Pumped Solid State) technology which has been developed in-house by the company. The lasers are the first of their type to offer full digital blanking capabilities, and a huge factor in their favour is that they do not require three phase power supplier or water cooling. They can simply be plugged into a local 13 Amp domestic supply. They employ an easy-to-use Windows-style operating environment with the control system based on IBM ThinkPad laptop PCs with Laser Electronics’ bespoke Millennium operating software.
   "It is the first major major installation of diode laser technology that we are aware of," continued Michael Lister. "In addition, we have already added the new diode lasers - 400mW and 2.5W – to our hire fleet, and they are ideal for corporate presentation work."

Part three will try to take care of the technical development of Laser Electronics’ HPG DPSS laser system, and it’s where Entertainment Technology will do its best to explore the devilling of Clive Davie, the company’ managing director, who has added a spicy mixture into the world of laser development, and who has had experts from the US trekking out to his base in Skegness in an attempt to scoop up some of his skills.
   "In 1997 we decided to invest time and effort into bringing forward diode technology in the same manner as we pioneered low cost laser reprocessing in the early nineties," Clive explained. "Initial development of semiconductor technology dates back to the early fifties and sixties and early laser diode systems were prototyped in the seventies but at sub-zero operating temperatures. Laser diodes eventually became available in the eighties.
   "DPSS systems generally suffered from poor reliability, with insufficient thought given to cavity contaminants or external cavity mechanical stress, which resulted in downgraded output and/or failure of SHG (Secondary Harmonic Generation) crystals. There is also the possibility of failure of the primary pump diode, due to high current drive levels. Systems also suffer from poor beam quality and poor divergence. Various systems we tested had similar constraints with side pumping or single in-line cavities, which presented two further problems. One involved the difficulty of thermally stabilising a very narrow cavity made from Alu; as the cavity changes in thermal instability, so does the shape or mode of the beam. The other problem involved the direct modulation of the laser output at moderate to high frequencies of 10Khz and above.
   "We solved all of these problems within a relatively short period of time and developed the only UK manufactured 2.5W DPSS laser system that can offer near diffraction limited output @ 2.5W output at 532nm with 10Khz direct modulation and a beam divergence of 0.25mr 1e/2. In short, this allows the laser beam emitted from the output aperture to stay highly focused to produce sharply defined images. Our unit also have a blanking ability so that displayed images can have separate parts within the graphic projection as they use only two high speed galvometer-type scanners to draw images. Most importantly, this means that the perceived output from the laser appears greater than the actual output power."