We report orientation-specific, surface-sensitive structural characterization of colloidal CdSe nanorods withextended X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy and ab initio density functional theory calculations.Our measurements of crystallographically aligned CdSe nanorods show that they have reconstructed Cd-richsurfaces. They exhibit orientation-dependent changes in interatomic distances which are qualitatively reproducedby our calculations. These calculations reveal that the measured interatomic distance anisotropy originatesfrom the nanorod surface.
