Structures, chemical stabilities and nonlinear optical properties of alkali metals-adsorbed niobium-doped silicon (M@SinNb+) clusters are investigated using the DFT methods. The alkali metals prefer energetically to be attached as bridged bond rather than M-Si single bond in most of optimized structures. Adsorption of alkali metals on doped silicon clusters gradually enhances their chemical stabilities with increasing cluster size. Noteworthily, the first hyperpolarizabilities (beta(tot)) of the M@SinNb+ clusters, obtained by using the long-range corrected CAM-B3LYP functional, are large enough to establish their strong nonlinear optical behavior, especially for M@Si9Nb+ (M = Li, Na, and K), and the enhanced fret ordering by alkali metals is Na > K > Li. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.