  Understanding and controlling properties of plasmon-induced hot carriers is a
key step towards next-generation photovoltaic and photocatalytic devices. Here,
we uncover a route to engineering hot-carrier generation rates of silver
nanoparticles by designed embedding in dielectric host materials. Extending our
recently established quantum-mechanical approach to describe the decay of
quantized plasmons into hot carriers we capture both external screening by the
nanoparticle environment and internal screening by silver d-electrons through
an effective electron-electron interaction. We find that hot-carrier generation
can be maximized by engineering the dielectric host material such that the
energy of the localized surface plasmon coincides with the highest value of the
nanoparticle joint density of states. This allows us to uncover a path to
control the energy of the carriers and the amount produced, for example a large
number of relatively low-energy carriers are obtained by embedding in strongly
screening environments.
