Toward athermal silicon-on-insulator (de)multiplexers in the O-band.

We report on the design, fabrication, and characterization of a 1×4 silicon-on-insulator (SOI) demultiplexer exhibiting a significant reduction of its thermo-optical sensitivity in the O-band. The optical filtering is achieved by cascading several Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) fabricated on a 300-nm-thick SOI platform. Owing to an asymmetric design of the confinement for each MZIs, we found an athermal criterium that satisfies the spectral requirements.

Chip-to-chip optical interconnections between stacked self-aligned SOI photonic chips.

Photonic silicon devices are key enabling technologies for next generation High Performance Computers. In this paper, we report the possibility to stack and optically interconnect SOI based photonic chips for future System-In-Package photonic architecture. Combining vertical grating couplers and state-of-the-art flip-chip technology, we demonstrated low loss penalties and wide spectral range optical interconnections between stacked photonic chips.

PROCORAD's international intercomparisons highlight the evolution of techniques used to determine uranium in urine.

Inter-laboratory tests are a means of assessing the analytical coherence of medical laboratories. In radiotoxicology, this kind of exercise makes it possible to keep up with laboratory know-how and with the evolution and relative performances of analytical techniques. The intercomparison exercises organised by PROCORAD (Association for the Promotion of Quality Controls in Radiotoxicological Bioassays) provide an opportunity to compare and contrast radiochemistry and metrology for the in vitro analysis of urine and faeces.

Radiotoxicological intercomparisons organised by the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique group in France.

People working in French nuclear plants are monitored either by whole body counting or by the measurement of biological samples. The radiochemical and radiometric procedures used have to be periodically reviewed. A working group, including practising biologists from CEA, EDF and the Armed Forces Health Service, instituted comparisons of radiotoxicological test assessments.

[Usual values of haptoglobin, protein-bound sialic acid and blood sedimentation in a population of the Cherbourg region].

The authors studied 3 parameters commonly used for the exploration of an inflammatory syndrome (determination of globular sedimentation rate at the first and second hour, concentration of plasma haptoglobin, sialic acid bound to plasma proteins rate). Haptoglobin and acid sialic assays were solely used in determining a control population (816 patients without any inflammatory reaction). As a matter of fact, the values we found complied with a normal distribution rule and confidence limits with a probability of 95% were obtained.