Technology advances are always driven by the discovery of new materials, better understanding of their properties and improvements in processing power. This trend is reflected in this work, where I will demonstrate how new science and applications of both scattering and imaging are enabled by these frontiers.

This thesis explores a broad spectrum of topics associated with the problems of scattering and imaging. The first topic concerns the fundamental study of the symmetry breaking and the nonlinear light scattering in the system of gold nanorod. In the most recent experiments, the intrinsic electrostatic asymmetry of gold nanorods was investigated by Ji-Young et al. using a variety of microscopy techniques, and the associated optical asymmetry was immediately demonstrated through the nonlinear optical experiments. The understanding of the symmetry breaking of gold nanorods, motivated the development of a model where the second order longitudinal plasmon resonance mode scatters with the electron gas and accounting for the plasmon damping effect. The new microscopic description self-consistently explains all the main features of the nonlinear optical components, and provides a fresh look that beautifully aligns with the recent observations of the nonlinear optical properties of nanorods.