Recent Advances in Ligand-Free, Charged and Defect-Rich Catalysts Developed by Laser Ablation and Processing in Liquids

Catalysts are the foundation of sustainable and renewable energies to address the depletion of natural fossil fuels problem. Because the catalysts’ activity is surface chemistry dependent, those “naked”, so-called ligand-free catalysts with more active sites exposing to the reactants are more preferable. With ligand-free, highly surface charged nanomaterials as the innate products, a newly emerging technique―laser synthesis and processing in liquids―is gaining increasing attention. The priority of laser-synthesized ligand-free metallic catalysts over chemically-synthesized counterparts has been confirmed by increasing groups through comparative studies on their catalytic activities. Besides the ligand-free metallic catalysts, this technique also excels at synthesis of bimetallic-alloy, core-shell and defect-rich semiconductor catalysts, and show good compatibility with other techniques (e.g., hydrothermal treatment and electrophoresis) to develop advanced catalysts such as ternary oxide, doped semiconductor, supported composite, nanoparticle-polymer matrix and film catalysts. Following the concept of why to choose, how to synthesize and where to use, in this review, we first introduce the advantages of this technique and the synthesized catalysts, secondly show how to develop complex catalysts using the laser-generated particles as the building blocks, and finally present the exciting application examples for photodegradation, water splitting and fuel cells.