**1. Introduction**

Searching the literature we can observe that there is a huge amount of techniques that can be used for material preparation. As a matter of fact, for each group of materials there is a specific route more suitable to be used. An interesting conclusion we can make is the fact that unusual properties obtained in a specific material is sometimes related to the selected preparation method. To be more specific, not only the method used but also the solvent, the concentration, the manner, or the sequence in which the reaction components are mixed make these characteristics more pronounced when we are taking into consideration the preparation of nanomaterials.

On the other hand, among several methods developed in the last decade for material preparation, it can be observed that one stands apart: the pulsed laser ablation technique (PLA). The reason seems to be the high potential presented by the laser-based material processing for the thin solid film preparation, nanocrystal growth, surface cleaning and microelectronic device fabrication [1–5]. The pulsed laser ablation of solid materials was initially carried out in a conventionally evacuated deposition chamber and the majority of the results have focused on pulsed laser deposition (PLD) of solid targets in vacuum and in a diluted gaseous ambient [6, 7].

**Figure 1.** (a) Experimental set up for the LALE experiments (b) interaction diagram.

Moreover, a slight modification of the PLD technique for materials preparation is the laser ablation in liquid environment (LALE). This technique has been extensively used at the beginning for the preparation of colloidal solution of metallic nanoparticles and subsequently as a successful technique for the fabrication of nanostructured metals oxide, nitrate and other materials of various compositions, morphologies and phases [8, 9]. Additionally, this technique nowadays can be considered a chemically clean and one-pot synthetic route by which a variety of functionalized new nanostructures can be prepared with a high yield of the final product without any by-products and, mostly, there is no need for further purification.

Compared with others techniques, LALE can be considered as a low cost experimental technique, which presents few controllable parameters and provides extreme experimental conditions of high temperature and pressure that favors the formation of unusual metastable phases. The technique consists of the interaction of a high-intense Laser pulse with a solid target immersed in a liquid solution as shown in **Figure 1(a)**. In this case, both the ablation of the target material and the interaction of the laser beam with the solvent (**Figure 1b**) occur simultaneously. As a consequence, the plasma plume formed by the target ablation expands and is confined by the liquid. Some works indicated that the density of the ablated species is of the order of 1022–1023 cm3 , the temperature could reach 4000–5000 K and the pressure is of the order of 10 GPa inside the plasma plume generated by the ablation in liquid [8]. According to Ogata and coworkers [10], interesting chemical reactions could take place at the interface between the plasma plume and the liquid, allowing the synthesis of a new chemical compound.

Although this technique has proved to be an excellent route for material preparation, this methodology has been used mainly to obtain metal oxide, metals colloids, semiconductor and nitrites [11–17]. Therefore, it will be presented, in detail, the synthesis of five chemical compounds prepared by the LALE technique that had been prepared at the Solid State Laboratory of Federal University of Pernambuco in order to demonstrate the versatility of the laser ablation technique and also to convince the scientific community that this is a very powerful tool for the preparation of complex materials.
