In this study, an effective method is proposed for controlling a titanium foil surface’s wettability. A microholes array series is fabricated on the surface of titanium foil by a femtosecond laser under different laser energy and pulse number. The changes of the titanium surface’s morphology are characterized. When placed in a darkroom with high-temperature treatment and immersed in alcohol under UV irradiation, respectively, the femtosecond laser treated surfaces display switchable wettability. It is demonstrated that the changing between Ti-OH and Ti-O prompts the transformation between superhydrophilic and superhydrophobic. Compared with existing reports, the switchable wetting cycle is shortened to 1.5 h. The functional surfaces with switchable wettability have potential applications in oil–water separation and water mist collection.

A phase-shifted fiber Bragg grating (PS-FBG) based on a microchannel was proposed and realized by combining the point-by-point scanning method with chemical etching. The PS-FBG is composed of a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) and a microchannel through the fiber core. The microchannel can introduce phase shift into the FBG. What is more important is that it exposes the fiber core to the external environment. The phase shift peak is sensitive to the liquid refractive index, and it shows a linear refractive index response wavelength and intensity sensitivity of 2.526 nm/RIU and -111 dB/RIU, respectively. Therefore, such gratings can be used as sensors or tunable filters.

In this study, we propose an effective method for the fabrication of annulus micro-/nanostructures by a femtosecond laser doughnut beam. Compared with the traditional Bessel annulus beam shaping system, this method greatly compresses the light propagation path. It is theoretically and experimentally demonstrated that the obtained axial section of the peak envelope in the processing area is two waists of the isosceles triangle. By moving the relative position of the sample, annulus microstructures with different diameters on copper sheet could be fabricated. In addition, laser induced periodic surface structures with controllable direction are fabricated by this optical system.

In order to improve the morphology of microchannels fabricated by femtosecond laser ablation, the thermal process was introduced into the post-treatment processing. It was found that the thermal process cannot only decrease the roughness but also the width and depth of the microchannel. The change rates of width, depth, and roughness of the microchannel increase with processing temperature. When we prolong the time of constant temperature, the change rate of the width decreases at the beginning, and then it tends to be stable. However, the change rates of depth and roughness increase, and then they tend to be stable. In this Letter, we discuss the reasons of the above phenomena.

We evaluate the effects of the holes geometry drilled by a femtosecond laser on a stainless alloy with various defocused irradiation time, which ranges from 0 min to 1 h. The laser ablation efficiency is increased by a factor of 3 when the irradiation time is elevated from 0 to 30 min. Also, the morphology of the hole is observed by a scanning electron microscope, where the result indicates that the defocused irradiation time has a significant influence on the morphology changes. The reason for such changes is discussed based on the pretreatment effect and the confined plasma plume. As an application example, the microchannel is fabricated by a femtosecond laser combined with the defocused irradiation to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method in fabricating functional structures.