We report a high-stability ultrafast ultraviolet (UV) laser source at 352 nm by exploring an all-fiber, all-polarization-maintaining (all-PM), Yb-doped femtosecond fiber laser at 1060 nm. The output power, pulse width, and optical spectrum width of the fiber laser are 6 W, 244 fs, and 17.5 nm, respectively. The UV ultrashort pulses at a repetition rate of 28.9 MHz are generated by leveraging single-pass second-harmonic generation in a 1.3-mm-long BiB₃O₆ (BIBO) and sum frequency generation in a 5.1-mm-long BIBO. The maximum UV output power is 596 mW. The root mean square error of the output power of UV pulses is 0.54%. This laser, with promising stability, is expected to be a nice source for frontier applications in the UV wavelength window.

Laser processing with high-power ultrashort pulses, which promises high precision and efficiency, is an emerging new tool for material structuring. High repetition rate ultrafast laser highlighting with a higher degree of freedom in its burst mode is believed to be able to create micro/nanostructures with even more variety, which is promising for electrochemical applications. We employ a homemade high repetition rate ultrafast fiber laser for structuring metal nickel (Ni) and thus preparing electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) for the first time, we believe. Different processing parameters are designed to create three groups of samples with different micro/nanostructures. The various micro/nanostructures not only increase the surface area of the Ni electrode but also regulate local electric field and help discharge hydrogen bubbles, which offer more favorable conditions for HER. All groups of the laser-structured Ni exhibit enhanced electrocatalytic activity for HER in the alkaline solution. Electrochemical measurements demonstrate that the overpotential at 10 mA cm ^{- 2} can be decreased as much as 182 mV compared with the overpotential of the untreated Ni (-457 mV versus RHE).

Edge enhancement is a fundamental and important topic in imaging and image processing, as perception of edge is one of the keys to identify and comprehend the contents of an image. Edge enhancement can be performed in many ways, through hardware or computation. Existing methods, however, have been limited in free space or clear media for optical applications; in scattering media such as biological tissue, light is multiple scattered, and information is scrambled to a form of seemingly random speckles. Although desired, it is challenging to accomplish edge enhancement in the presence of multiple scattering. In this work, we introduce an implementation of optical wavefront shaping to achieve efficient edge enhancement through scattering media by a two-step operation. The first step is to acquire a hologram after the scattering medium, where information of the edge region is accurately encoded, while that of the nonedge region is intentionally encoded with inadequate accuracy. The second step is to decode the edge information by time-reversing the scattered light. The capability is demonstrated experimentally, and, further, the performance, as measured by the edge enhancement index (EI) and enhancement-to-noise ratio (ENR), can be controlled easily through tuning the beam ratio. EI and ENR can be reinforced by ～8.5 and ～263 folds, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that edge information of a spatial pattern can be extracted through strong turbidity, which can potentially enrich the comprehension of actual images obtained from a complex environment.