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It has been demonstrated that nanocrystals (NCs) are characterized by peculiar lattice constants taking into account strain effects occurring at NC surface. Thus, softwares for XRD data interpretation have now been improved to take into account the peculiar structural characteristics of nanocrystalline materials. Much more powerful excitation sources such as synchrotron radiation, for instance, lead to the development of a new set of techniques based on X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XANES: X-ray absorption near edge structure; EXAFS: extended X-ray absorption fine structure), which demonstrated very useful to obtain information, for instance on crystal plane exposed, possible presence of any impurity, ultimately allowing to understand the key points to direct the growth of NPs with tailored shape [43].

Indeed, a plethora of novel techniques and methods have been implemented and are constantly improved to achieve an increasingly high and accurate control on size, morphology, crystalline phase, and chemical nature of the resulting nano-objects. Accordingly, the techniques to characterize materials had to make a big step forward to face the increasing accuracy needed in material investigation and to understand the new properties arising from materials at nanoscale. Existing optical, structural, and morphologic characterization techniques have been strongly enhanced to fit nanomaterial characterization, and new techniques have been proposed to face the increasing demand of information.

In the framework of an electrostatic approach, we are interested in finding a solution to the Laplace equation for the potential ∇ 2 = 0, which will enable calculation of the electric field E = −∇ . 84) l=0 where Pl (cos θ) are the Legendre polynomials of order l. 86) l=0 where coefficients Al , Bl , and C l can now be determined by imposing the boundary conditions at r → ∞ and at the sphere surface r = a. 94) Therefore, we can conclude that application of the field induces inside the sphere a dipole moment p of magnitude proportional to © 2016 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC May 27, 2015 10:52 PSP Book - 9in x 6in 01-LucianoDeSio-c01 Localized Surface Plasmon 29 |E0 |.