Executive Summary : | With advances in materials chemistry and nanoscience, nanoparticle (NP) research has focused on manipulating the properties of NP by controlling their size, composition, morphology and surface chemistry. Since research on nanomaterials has increased considerably in recent years, the main focus has gradually shifted from the synthesis and characterization of properties to the technological development of multicomponent alloy NPs. The interest in multicomponent alloy NP systems is due to their diverse properties and functions owing to the synergistically improved physicochemical properties of the individual components. Among all the multicomponent alloy NPs reported in the literature, the design, synthesis and characterization of multicomponent plasmonic alloy NPs (e.g. Cu-Fe-Pd, Co-Cu-Ni, Pd-Cu-Ni) have recently become a hot research topic in the field of basic and applied materials science. Moreover, the interest in plasmonic NPs is even greater when it comes to multicomponent nanosystem of various morphologies and phase compositions, such as core-shell, solid solution, intermetallic structures/alloys, etc. The main factor that determines these characteristics is related to the chemical nature of the metals and their phase diagrams. Another crucial factor is the synthesis process that can promote the formation of different structures of NPs depending on the synthesis conditions. Synthesizing NPs with these characteristics is a daunting task, and therefore a new state-of-the-art technique is needed. In this regard, the laser synthesis and processing of colloids (LSPC) technique can be used for the synthesis of multicomponent plasmonic alloy NPs. Recently, LSPC has emerged as a blooming interdisciplinary “green” technique and has gained significant interest due to its promising advantages including simplicity, environmental friendliness, contamination-free NPs, ease of obtaining different types of NPs with the same set-up, which is very difficult to obtain by chemical synthesis techniques due to its sophisticated setup. There are some articles that demonstrate the efficacy of LSPC in the synthesis of multicomponent alloy NPs in the literature. Despite the impressive efforts that have been made to understand and improve LSPC techniques for efficient generation of alloy NPs and their applications in the different fields such as sensing, biomedicine, etc., there still remains a challenge to be addressed to realize the full potential of LSPC. This means that the fundamental mechanism of LSPC and the key processes that control the structures, size distribution and composition of NPs are not yet fully understood. Furthermore, the detailed understanding of the non-equilibrium chemical pathways of NP fabrication by LSPC and the understanding of the role of critical thermodynamic phenomena developed during LSPC need to be fully elucidated. Therefore, a comprehensive study in this direction is necessary to fill the unexplored gap in the scientific community. |