Quantum confinement of electronic motion in semiconductor nanoparticles leads to quantization of its band continua of the bulk. The relaxation between the resulting quantized levels by electron phonon coupling was expected, but not found, to be slow due to the small phonon frequencies (phonon bottleneck). Studying the electronic relaxation from the band gap and a higher excited state in CdSe dots and rods under different perturbations suggest the importance of coupling the excited electron to the surface. The surface species act as an efficient heat bath or as electron trapping sites in the linear or nonlinear (Auger) relaxation processes. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.