[Working at night in intensive care and resuscitation].

The care teams working in the intensive care unit (ICU) most often practice on twelve-hour day-night cycles. Collaboration is close and regular, with a high level of trust shared between the professionnals to ensure the often complex care required by the patient's condition. While ICU practice is of great interest to caregivers who make it their specialty, it can also become less attractive over time due to the physical, family and social constraints of night work.

Saturable Absorber Cr(4)+:(Sr, Ca)Gd(4)(SiO(4))(3)O Crystals as Q Switches for a Diode-Pumped Nd(3)+:KGd(WO(4))(2) Laser.

Passive Q switching of a diode-pumped Nd(3+):KGd(WO(4))(2) laser is demonstrated by use of Cr(4+):SrGd(4)(SiO(4))(3)O and Cr(4+):CaGd(4)(SiO(4))(3)O crystals as saturable absorbers. An average output power of 40 mW was obtained with a pulse repetition rate of ~0.4 MHz.

Diode-bar end-pumped high-power Nd:Y(3)Al(5)O(12) planar waveguide laser.

A compact high-power planar waveguide laser end pumped by a diode-bar is reported. The waveguide was fabricated by liquid-phase epitaxy and had an 80-microm-thick, 1.5-at.

Blue-green single-frequency laser based on intracavity frequency doubling of a diode-pumped Ytterbium-doped laser.

Single-frequency lasers in the blue-green (500 nm) visible spectrum are important for many applications including iodine precision spectroscopy, optical frequency standards or ionized argon lasers substitution. To the best of our knowledge, we report in this paper the first single-frequency diode-pumped Ytterbium-doped solid-state laser operating at 501.7 nm by intracavity second harmonic generation (SHG).