Materials with characteristic structure sizes of a few nanometers are a forefront area of modern materials science due to the possibility to tailor many properties by changing size, shape and dimensionality. Often, such nanomaterials have to be embedded in a matrix in order to be suitable for technological applications, for example in order to achieve stability under ambient conditions or in order to interface to other components of an integrated device. The understanding of how the electronic properties change with size and how they are influenced by their surrounding are important tasks from both industrial and academic points of view.

A large number of publications is devoted to the examination of properties of nanostructured materials by different experimental and theoretical methods. Synchrotron radiation based soft X-ray absorption and emission spectroscopies are excellent non-destructive tools to study the electronic structure of solids. The bulk sensitivity in conjunction with the atom selectivity of the methods allows to study the electronic structure of sophisticated materials such as embedded clusters or nanotubes in bundles. The local and chemical sensitivity allows to investigate atoms with different chemical environment and trace changes in the electronic structure. The photon-in-photon-out mode is applicable to all materials including isolators. These technical aspects will be demonstrated with results on two specific material systems.

(i) For Si nanoclusters embedded into a silicon dioxide matrix it was found that the density of the states in the valence and conduction bands are size dependent and the band gap size is strongly influenced by the dioxide matrix.

(ii) The electronic properties of Mo-I-S nanotubes and nanowires depend on their stoichiometry and can be explained by changes in the S-Mo bond due to the strong hybridization between S p and Mo d states in the vicinity of the Fermi energy.

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1. Electron Dynamics in magnetic Nanostructures
2. The BESSY Soft X-Ray FEL in Berlin Adlershof
3. Electronic structure and chemical environment of Si nanoclusters embedded in a SiO₂ matrix.
4. Electronic structure of the subnanometer diameter MoS2 single wall nanotubes