The effect of extreme water repellency, called the lotus effect, is caused by the formation of a Cassie–Baxter state in which only a small portion of the wetting liquid droplet is in contact with the surface. The rest of the bottom of the droplet is in contact with air pockets. Instrumental methods are often used to determine the textural features that cause this effect—scanning electron and atomic force microscopies, profilometry, etc. However, this result provides only an accurate texture model, not the actual information about the part of the surface that is wetted by the liquid. Here, we show a practical method for estimating the surface fraction of texture that has contact with liquid in a Cassie–Baxter wetting state. The method is performed using a set of ethanol–water mixtures to determine the contact angle of the textured and chemically equivalent flat surfaces of AlSI 304 steel, 7500 aluminum, and siloxane elastomer. We showed that the system of Cassie–Baxter equations can be solved graphically by the wetting diagrams introduced in this paper, returning a value for the texture surface fraction in contact with a liquid. We anticipate that the demonstrated method will be useful for a direct evaluation of the ability of textures to repel liquids, particularly superhydrophobic and superoleophobic materials, slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces, etc.

We report on a picosecond two-stage double-pass chirped pulse amplifier based on a low doping level Yb:YAG rods. After compression, it provides output pulses with a pulsewidth of 1.15 ps and an energy of more than 20 mJ at a repetition rate of 100 Hz with a beam quality of M² ∼1.05. These pulses were frequency doubled in a two-cascaded second harmonic converter based on LBO and BBO crystals with an output energy of 12 mJ and 5 mJ at 515 nm, suitable for simultaneously pumping OPCPA cascades.

The eligibility of applying the Owens–Wendt approach to determining the free surface energy of liquid-repellent aluminum surfaces, with micro- and nanotextures formed by a femtosecond laser, was considered. This approach has been shown to be applicable using two essential parameters that can be derived from the graphs. The first is related to the fraction of the contact area between the liquid and the solid surface in the Cassie state. The second is related to the degree of intrinsic polarity of the surface material or the applied organic modifier. The presented interpretation was used to compare the liquid repellency of the obtained textures. A microtexture with a period of 60 μm and a groove width of 45 μm has been shown to be the most liquid repellent. Among the modifiers, 1H,1H,2H,2H-perfluoroctyltriethoxysilane was the most effective, and stearic acid was only slightly inferior, but promising in terms of cost and environmental friendliness. It was shown that spontaneous hydrophobization provided a contact angle with water up to 159°, but the stability of such textures was inferior to the considered modifiers.

We report efficient amplification of chirped supercontinuum pulses in a two-stage stimulated Raman amplifier based on double tungstate [ K G d ( W O 4 ) 2 ] crystals, pumped with 1.2 ps transform-limited pulses at a 1030 nm wavelength. The second stage demonstrates a conversion efficiency of 55% with an output pulse energy of 0.6 mJ at a 1135 nm wavelength. The amplified Stokes bandwidth is 10 times the pump bandwidth, providing 145 fs pulses after compression.

Although liquid-repellent surfaces are in demand in many applications, their use is limited by the Cassie state’s sustainability to environmental factors, such as the repellency of liquids with a surface tension lower than that of water. This phenomenon remains not fully understood, despite a well-developed theory. In the current work, wetting of femtosecond laser-textured aluminum surfaces for probe liquids with a surface tension of 72.8–21.2 mN/m was considered. The resulting patterns were an array of pillars at the micro level and fractal-like structures at the nano level. These structured surfaces were treated with alkoxysilanes and oleic acid. All textured samples exhibited a Cassie state with water, and contact angles greater than 150° were achieved with silane-treated surfaces. A decrease in the surface tension of the probe liquid led to а transition to the Wetzel state at 44–46 mN/m for alkoxysilanes and at 52 mN/m for oleic acid. A typical shape of the textured surface wetting curve is proposed. It was shown that the determined values of the surface tension of the Cassie-Wenzel transition were 10–15 mN/m lower than those predicted by the Cassie equations.