Gordon Miller

Effective 2019, Prof. Miller is no longer accepting post-doctoral researchers or graduate students.

The major research goal has been to identify new inorganic materials with potentially interesting properties by using theoretical modeling with experimental approaches synergistically. For many years, we concentrated on intermetallic compounds because they are not only well suited for combined theoretical/experimental investigations, but also offer fundamental challenges towards fundamental understanding of the relationships among chemical composition, atomic structure, physical properties and chemical bonding.

We have studied various compound-types to elucidate the factors influencing the distributions and arrangements of chemical elements in complex structures: the so-called “coloring problem.” That is, "Where are the atoms?". We developed a successful algorithm, based on tight-binding theory, to predict patterns of atomic distributions in intermetallic compounds, and used this algorithm to solve the structures of complex metal-rich solids in tandem with diffraction and spectroscopy.

Published: W. Xie, R. Cava, G.J. Miller, “Packing of Russian Doll Clusters to Form a Nanometer-Scale CsCl-Type Compound in a Cr-Zn-Sn Complex Metallic Alloy,” J. Mater. Chem. C, 2017, 5, 7215-7221.