Plasma resonance of binary amorphous and crystalline Al-transition metal alloys: Experiments and ab initio calculations

Highlights: • A comprehensive study of the plasma resonance of amorphous Al-transition metal alloys is given. • A characteristic fingerprint for the plasma energy versus concentration is presented. • The experimental results are supported by DFT calculations. • Amorphous alloys are found to be model systems for studying the influence of interband transitions on the plasma resonance. - Abstract: We report on measurements of the volume plasmon loss energy E_P by electron energy loss spectroscopy of binary amorphous Al–(Sc, Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Y, Pd, Ce) alloys. In these systems the measured E_P can be described by an effective valence of the transition metal independent of the particular transition metal. By exploiting ab initio calculations for the crystalline counterparts in the case of Al–(Ti, V, Fe, Ni) we show that this behavior can be understood in terms of the full dielectric function taking into account intra- and interband transitions mainly due to the presence of d-states close to the Fermi energy. This is validated by the comparison with published experimental data on binary Al systems with the non-transition metals Be, Mg, Ca, and Zn. Due to the absence of composition-dependent structural phase changes, amorphous alloys are found to be model-like systems for studying the influence of interband transitions on the plasma resonance