The absorptance of metals is often low within the visible and near-infrared band at room temperature. Increasing the absorption of metals plays a vital role in reducing energy consumption and production cost. After irradiation by 10 ns linearly polarized pulses with fluence close to the zero-probability damage threshold, the surface of 45# steel samples exhibited four kinds of surface structures in the spot area. The samples’ absorptance is improved by 38% when a high-quality laser-induced surface structure (LIPSS) appears at the spot centre. With the increase of the number of pulses, LIPSS begin to melt down, which will decrease the surface absorptance due to the appearance of damage stripes. The relative absorptance of samples was measured by an integrating sphere system. The paper reports detailed experiments to show that LIPSS can improve samples’ absorptance significantly.

A high-power narrow-linewidth 1.55 μm pulsed laser, based on MgO:PPLN OPO, has been achieved using a F–P etalon. The pump source is a 1064 nm acousto-optical (AO) Q-switched Nd:YAG laser with a repetition rate of 10 kHz. Under the maximum pump power of 18 W, the signal output power of 2.57 W is demonstrated at 1551.1 nm with a linewidth of 0.07 nm, corresponding to a slope efficiency of 16.1%. Different from traditional inversion lasers, the narrow-linewidth wavelength tunability of approximately 1.55 μm can be realized by changing the temperature.

At detection ranges on the order of kilometers, cat-eye echoes degrade into pixel-level spots and exhibit responses similar to those of compact, high-echo false targets, making it difficult for single-band systems to balance weak-target detection rates with false alarm control. To address this, this paper pairs spatially registered and radiometrically calibrated 808 nm and 905 nm images to form a dual-band detection pair, utilizing the cross-band response asymmetry caused by chromatic defocus for discrimination. Experiments show that cat-eye targets exhibit coupled asymmetry in intensity, scale, and energy distribution, whereas the false targets under test generally maintain approximate symmetry; furthermore, the dominant discriminative information shifts from scale differences to intensity differences as distance increases. Based on this pattern, this paper proposes a range-conditioned “detection–reclassification” framework that dynamically matches appropriate models based on target distance. In this framework, a structurally symmetric, two-branch, multi-scale attention-fused YOLO network is used for candidate target detection, while an explicit asymmetric feature classifier further processes challenging samples to retain weak targets and suppress false alarms. Field experiments conducted at distances ranging from 100 to 2100 m achieved an overall mAP50 of 0.907 and an overall mAP50–95 of 0.475, with the mAP50 improving by 17.7 and 10.8 percentage points, respectively, compared to the 808 nm and 905 nm single-band baselines. The results demonstrate that this framework can effectively balance the detection of weak targets at long ranges with the suppression of false targets under the evaluated conditions.

A temperature-sensing scheme is realized by a passively mode-locked Yb-doped fiber laser based on the nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM). The ambient temperature can be measured by detecting the pulse repetition frequency of the mode-locked fiber laser by an oscilloscope. When the ambient temperature increases from −40 °C to 6 °C, the pulse repetition frequency decreases linearly with a temperature sensitivity of 72.548 Hz/°C. The experimental results prove the feasibility of the mode-locked laser sensor operating in a low-temperature environment.

A high-efficiency extra-cavity Raman generator is demonstrated using a potassium yttrium tungstate (KYW) crystal for the first time, achieving switchable yellow-green laser output at 556 nm and 560 nm. The KYW Raman crystal is single-pass pumped by 532 nm green light, which is obtained by the second-harmonic generation of a 1064 nm flash-lamp-pumped Nd:YAG electro-optic (EO) Q-switched laser. When the incident pump energy at 1064 nm is 156 mJ under a repetition rate of 1 Hz, the maximum output energy reaches 51.3 mJ at 532 nm with a slope efficiency of 41.5%. By adjusting the polarization direction of the 532 nm light, two characteristic Raman shifts of the KYW crystal can be selectively excited at 765 cm⁻¹ and 905 cm⁻¹. Furthermore, the 556 nm and 560 nm visible lasers are generated with the maximum output energies of 11.6 mJ and 16.2 mJ, corresponding to the slope efficiencies of 37.6% and 48.2%, respectively. Compared with the 532 nm pulse width (18.2 ns), an obvious Raman pulse width compression effect occurred (8.2 ns).