I am only aware of doping into an intrinsic semiconductor. Most probably doping into a metal conductor (lets say silver/aluminium/copper): does it actually make any sense?
thank you very much for your response. Alloys and doping are a bit different, am I right? As far I understand, the main difference between alloy and doping is, doping won't make any change in the lattice structure, where as alloy will form a complete new structure.
Lets say, we can get a mix of Al and Cu in nano scale with some mixing ratio and cal call that Al-Cu alloy and that's a new bimetallic nano-alloy. But what I was thinking is something a bit similar how we dope in Si and Ge. I have seen only semiconductors are doped, looking for any pure metal nanoparticle doped with another pure metal.
Doping a semiconductor is vastly different from alloying.
One difference relates to the amount of the solute. Typical dopant density is 1E16 per cc. Typical alloy solute is 1% of the solution.
But a much more important difference is the geometric or non-linear effect. A micro/nano amount of the dopant can change the conductivity of the semiconductor many orders of magnitude!!
Obviously, such a non-linear (exponential or more) cannot happen in the case of conductivity. In principle, it may be possible in the case of magnetic properties.
I am not aware of any physical property change by micro/nano amount of metal B in metal A.
Thank you very much everybody for being so kind and helpful to me.
It had been very much helpful for me, all of your valuable comments. I think, with your valuable comments, now I can relate and differentiate between doping and alloying.