Laser synthesis emerges as a suitable technique to produce ligand-free nanoparticles, alloys and functionalized nanomaterials for catalysis, imaging, biomedicine, energy and environmental applications. In the last decade, laser ablation and nanoparticle generation in liquids has proven to be a unique and efficient technique to generate, excite, fragment and conjugate a large variety of nanostructures in a scalable and clean way. In this work, we give an overview on the fundamentals of pulsed laser synthesis of nanocolloids and new information about its scalability towards selected applications. Biomedicine, catalysis and sensing are the application areas mainly discussed in this review, highlighting advantages of laser-synthesized nanoparticles for these types of applications and, once partially resolved, the limitations to the technique for large-scale applications.

Photocatalytic water splitting for H₂ production and photocatalytic oxidation of 2-propanol, an example of volatile organic compounds, were investigated over TiO₂ catalysts loaded with gold and/or ceria. In the water splitting reaction the presence of gold only slightly affected the performance of TiO₂ whereas the presence of CeO₂ had a more remarkable positive effect. In the 2-propanol oxidation Au/TiO₂ was the most active sample in terms of alcohol conversion whereas Au/TiO₂-CeO₂ exhibited the highest CO₂ yield. On the basis of characterization experiments (X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), Energy Dispersive X-ray Analysis EDX, surface area measurements, Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy (DRS) and Raman spectroscopy), it was suggested that the interaction of Au with TiO₂ causes an increase in the charge separation between the photo-excited electron/hole pairs, leading to an enhanced photocatalytic activity (to acetone over Au/TiO₂ and to CO₂ over Au/TiO₂-CeO₂), whereas the presence of ceria, acting as a hole trap, positively mainly affects the formation of hydrogen by water splitting.

The thermocatalytic, photocatalytic and photothermo-catalytic oxidation of some volatile organic compounds (VOCs), 2-propanol, ethanol and toluene, was investigated over brookite TiO₂-CeO₂ composites. The multi-catalytic approach based on the synergistic effect between solar photocatalysis and thermocatalysis led to the considerable decrease in the conversion temperatures of the organic compounds. In particular, in the photothermo-catalytic runs, for the most active samples (TiO₂-3 wt% CeO₂ and TiO₂-5 wt% CeO₂), the temperature at which 90% of VOC conversion occurred was about 60 °C, 40 °C and 20 °C lower than in the thermocatalytic tests for 2-propanol, ethanol and toluene, respectively. Furthermore, the addition of cerium oxide to brookite TiO₂ favored the total oxidation to CO₂ already in the photocatalytic tests at room temperature. The presence of small amounts of cerium oxide allowed to obtain efficient brookite-based composites facilitating the space charge separation and increasing the lifetime of the photogenerated holes and electrons as confirmed by the characterization measurements. The possibility to concurrently utilize the photocatalytic properties of brookite and the redox properties of CeO₂, both activated in the photothermal tests, is an attractive approach easily applicable to purify air from VOCs.