[Informal caregivers of elderly people in South Tyrol. A qualitative assessment of home care situation].

Within the framework of a pilot project in the sanitary district of Bruneck (sanitary establishment of South Tyrol), the concept of care management is being investigated both practically and scientifically for informal caregivers of elderly people in need of care since 2009 the results of the qualitative assessment of the homecare situation. The assessment before the intervention will form the basis for further design and implementation of individual stress-reducing and supportive offers for the informal caregivers. Using a semi structured interview guideline twelve problem-centered interviews with informal caregivers were conducted and analysed according to Mayring's content analysis technique (2007).

240-fs pulses with 22-W average power from a mode-locked thin-disk Yb:KY(WO(4))(2) laser.

We demonstrate what is to our knowledge the first passively mode-locked thin-disk Yb:KY(WO(4))(2) laser. The laser produces pulses of 240-fs duration with an average power of 22 W at a center wavelength of 1028 nm. At a pulse repetition rate of 25 MHz, the pulse energy is 0.

An all-optical trap for a gram-scale mirror.

We report on a stable optical trap suitable for a macroscopic mirror, wherein the dynamics of the mirror are fully dominated by radiation pressure. The technique employs two frequency-offset laser fields to simultaneously create a stiff optical restoring force and a viscous optical damping force. We show how these forces may be used to optically trap a free mass without introducing thermal noise, and we demonstrate the technique experimentally with a 1 g mirror.

Soliton mode-locked Er:Yb:glass laser.

We report on a simple diode-pumped passively mode-locked Er:Yb:glass laser generating transform-limited 1536-nm solitons of 255-fs duration with a repetition rate of 50 MHz and average power of 58 mW. We also discuss timing jitter and the trade-off between short pulses and high output power in these lasers.

Powerful red-green-blue laser source pumped with a mode-locked thin disk laser.

We present a red-green-blue laser source with average powers of 8 W in the red, 23 W in the green, and 10.1 W in the blue. The entire pump power for the nonlinear conversion stages is provided by a single laser oscillator without any amplifier stages.