Soft x-ray spectroscopy study of nanoscale materials

The ability to control the particle size and morphology of nanoparticles is of crucial importance nowadays both from a fundamental and industrial point of view considering the tremendous amount of high-tech applications. Controlling the crystallographic structure and the arrangement of atoms along the surface of nanostructured material will determine most of its physical properties. In general, electronic structure ultimately determines the properties of matter. Soft X-ray spectroscopy has some basic features that are important to consider. X-ray is originating from an electronic transition between a localized core state and a valence state. As a core state is involved, elemental selectivity is obtained because the core levels of different elements are well separated in energy, meaning that the involvement of the inner level makes this probe localized to one specific atomic site around which the electronic structure is reflected as a partial density-of-states contribution. The participation of valence electrons gives the method chemical state sensitivity and further, the dipole nature of the transitions gives particular symmetry information. The new generation synchrotron radiation sources producing intensive tunable monochromatized soft X-ray beams have opened up new possibilities for soft X-ray spectroscopy. The introduction of selectively excited soft X-ray emission has opened a new field of study by disclosing many new possibilities of soft X-ray resonant inelastic scattering. In this paper, some recent findings regarding soft X-ray absorption and emission studies of various nanostructured systems are presented.