Functional materials with specific bubble wettability play an important role in manipulating the behavior of underwater gas bubbles. Inspired by the natural Pitcher plant, we designed a large area lubricated slippery surface (LSS) by femtosecond laser processing for buoyancy-driven bubble self-transport and efficient gas capture. The mechanism of bubble self-transport involves a competition between the buoyancy and the resistance due to drag force and hysteresis. The transportation velocity of the bubbles on the LSS is strongly associated with the surface tension of the lubricants. The lower the surface tension, the higher the sliding velocity. On the basis of sufficient bubble adhesion, the shaped LSS tracks are fabricated to guide the bubble movement and achieve continuous manipulation between bubble merging and detachment. We demonstrate that these designable pathways on the LSS not only manipulate bubble behavior in a two-dimensional space but also realize three-dimensional movement of bubbles on the Mobius-striped LSS. Finally, a gas catcher decorated with large area LSS is manufactured for underwater bubble capture, which maintains a high capture efficiency (more than 90%) with an air output of ∼3.4 L min⁻¹. This finding reveals a meaningful interaction between the underwater bubbles and the LSS surface, accelerating the applications of bubble slippery surfaces in underwater flammable gas collection and tail gas treatment.

Artificial bioinspired surfaces are attracting increasing attention because of their fascinating characteristics, such as the structural color of a butterfly wing and the anisotropic wetting of a rice leaf. However, realization of the multicolor biomimetic metal surfaces with controlled anisotropy by using a simple, inexpensive and efficient method remains a challenge. Herein, we propose a focused laser interference lithography processing method, which has sufficient energy density and high processing efficiency to directly fabricate the groove structures on the metal surface. The surface is multicolor due to the diffraction grating effect of the regular groove structures, and exhibits anisotropic wetting due to its single-direction morphology. The influence of the observation angle on the diversity of colors and the anisotropic wetting under different heights and periods of grooves have been quantitatively investigated. A variety of patterns (e.g., leaf, crab, windmill, letter and so on) can be processed on various metals (e.g., stainless steel, Ti, Ni, Cu, Fe, Zn and so on) by this focused laser interference lithography because of its excellent flexibility and wide range of suitable materials. This multi-functional metal surface has broad applications in identification code, decorative beautification, anti-counterfeiting, information storage, bionic application design and so on.