This book focuses on chemical reactions and processing under extreme conditions—how materials react with highly concentrated active species and/or in a very confined high-temperature and high-pressure volume. Those ultimate reaction environments created by a focused laser beam, discharges, ion bombardments, or microwaves provide characteristic nano- and submicron-sized products and functional nanostructures. The book explores the chemistry and processing of metals and non-metals as well as molecules that are strongly dependent on the energy deposition processes and character of the materials. Descriptions of a wide range of topics are given from the perspective of a variety of research methodologies, material preparations, and applications. The reader is led to consider and review how a high-energy source interacts with materials, and what the key factors are that determine the quality and quantity of nanoproducts and nano-processing.

Yoshie Ishikawa has been a senior researcher at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) since 2013. She received her Ph.D. from Kumamoto University in 2003 and was an associate professor in Kagawa University until 2013. Her scientific focus is on the fabrication and application of pulsed laser melting in liquids for metallic and inorganic sub-micrometer particle synthesis.
Takahiro Nakamura is a graduate of Tohoku University, where he received his doctorate under the guidance of Prof. Eichiro Matsubara in 2004. He began his academic career as an assistant professor in 2005 at the Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials, Tohoku University. He now is an associate professor at the same institute. His current research interests are laser materials processing, especially the generation of metal and/or alloy nanoparticles by high-intensity ultra-short pulse laser irradiation in liquids.
Morihisa Saeki graduated from The University of Tokyo and received his doctorate there under the guidance of Prof. Takashi Nagata in 1999. He has been a senior researcher in the National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology since 2016. He was a visiting scientist at the Institute of Radiochemistry, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (Germany) in 2010. His current research interests are the application of laser-induced particle formation in liquids and elucidation of its mechanism using time-resolved X-ray absorption spectroscopy.
Tadatake Sato is a graduate of Kyoto University, where he completed his doctorate under the guidance of Prof. Kazuyoshi Tanaka in 1998. He now is a researcher at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). His current research interests are laser processing of various materials using unique laser-induced phenomena.
Teruki Sugiyama received his doctoratefrom Nankai University, China, under the supervision of Professors Teruo Matsuura and Jiben Meng in 2002. He has been a professor of applied chemistry at the College of Science, National Chiao Tung University since 2020. His research group has explored the possibility of high-energy laser-based phenomena such as optical tweezers and laser ablation in molecular/cluster systems. He has been particularly devoted to applying the optical tweezers method to crystal chemistry, and his group received the Best Paper Award from the Japanese Association for Crystal Growth (JACG) for their paper entitled "Control of Amino Acid and Protein Crystallization by Optical Trapping" in 2018. 
Hiroyuki Wada is an associate professor in the Department of Chemical Science and Engineering, School of Materials and Chemical Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology (2005 – present). His research is related to optical nanoparticles. He received the B. Eng. in 1990 and the M. Eng. in1992 from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He was a researcher for Sony Corp. and investigated lasers and laser processes (1992–2005). He was a visiting researcher at Stanford University (USA) in 2001. He received the D. Eng. degree in 2003 from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and he was a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University (USA, 2006–2007).
Tomoyuki Yatsuhashi graduated from the Tokyo Metropolitan University, where he received his doctorate under the guidance of Prof. Haruo Inoue in 1998. He has been a professor of chemistry in the Graduate School of Science, Osaka City University, since 2011. He was a visiting scientist in Germany at the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship, 2002–2003). In 2009, he was selected as a researcher of the Precursory Research for Embryonic Science and Technology Program of the Japan Science and Technology Agency. His current research interests are high-energy chemistry in the liquid phase and the photophysics and photochemistry of multiply charged molecular cations.