Since 2019, Prof. Miller is no longer accepting post-doctoral researchers or graduate students.
My group’s 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 not only are they well suited for combined theoretical/experimental investigations, but they also offer fundamental challenges towards understanding the relationships among chemical composition, atomic structure, physical properties, and chemical bonding.
My group has studied various compound-types to elucidate the factors influencing the distributions and arrangements of chemical elements in complex structures: the so-called “coloring problem.” We developed a successful algorithm, based on tight-binding theory, to predict patterns of atomic distributions in metal-rich compounds, and used this algorithm to solve the structures of complex metal-rich solids in tandem with diffraction and spectroscopy.