**2.1. Procedure of laser ablation in the liquid phase**

Laser ablation in liquid phase is performed for a solid material suspended in poor solvent, in which the material is difficult to dissolve, by irradiation of laser pulses through the side wall of a transparent cuvette/bottle or the top surface of the solution. The suspension was stirred by a magnetic stirrer during the irradiation. The experiments presented in this chapter were performed with laser pulses of 5 ns pulse duration from a tunable optical parametric oscillator excited by a Q-switched YAG laser operated at a 10 Hz repetition rate (Spectra Physics, MOPO) or from a second harmonics of a Q-switched YAG laser (Continuum Surelite) operated at a 10 Hz repetition rate. The incident laser power was controlled using a Glan-Laser calcite polarizer. By maintaining the laser beam unfocused or loosely focused, the energy density was maintained below a few hundred milli-joule per square centimeter in order to not achieve a plasma state [29, 32, 33]. The experimental details are described in the following sections. All laser ablation experiments were performed at room temperature (24°C).
