Study of Ag induced bimetallic (Au–Ag) nanowires on silicon (5 5 12) surfaces: Experiment and theoretical aspects

•A very detailed UHV-MBE growth of Au–Ag nanowires under various substrate conditions and plausible mechanism obtained by modelling through KMC and DFT simulations.•Optimum conditions of thickness of Ag and substrate growth temperature were achieved for growing high aspect ratio Au–Ag nanowire structures.•Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulations based on kinematics of ad-atoms on an anisotropic template with a solid on solid model in which the relative ratios of binding energies (that are obtained from the Density Functional Theory) have been used and the KMC simulations results agree with the experimental observations.•Advantage of having bimetallic structures as effective substrates for Surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy application is demonstrated by detecting Rhodamine 6G (R6G) molecule at the concentration of 10–7M.