Hot carriers from intra- and interband transitions in gold-silver alloy nanoparticles.

Hot electrons and holes generated from the decay of localised surface plasmons in metallic nanoparticles can be harnessed for applications in solar energy conversion and sensing. In this paper, we study the generation of hot carriers in large spherical gold-silver alloy nanoparticles using a recently developed atomistic modelling approach that combines a solution of Maxwell's equations with large-scale tight-binding simulations. We find that hot-carrier properties depend sensitively on the alloy composition.