Daniel Fredrickson
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Chemistry
Mixing metals can produce materials that do surprising things. Some conduct electricity with no resistance, turn heat into electricity, act as strong magnets, speed up chemical reactions or show quantum effects.
- Fields
Chemistry
Materials Science
Physics
- Topics
intermetallic compounds
intermetallics
alloys
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Develop computational tools to compare chemical pressure scaffolds, networks of overly compressed atom-to-atom contacts, across intermetallic crystal structures and connect them to material properties.
- Test the hypothesis that positive chemical pressure networks support soft atomic motions behind structural transformations, by synthesizing and characterizing new intermetallic compounds.
- Design synthetic strategies to modify chemical pressure scaffolds within crystal structures, for example by changing which atoms make up the compound, and measure the effects on structure and behavior.
- Study how chemical pressure scaffolds interact with electronic driving forces, using theoretical calculations and graph-theory methods to derive general rules for intermetallic structures.
More about the research
Many of these materials are intermetallic compounds. In these solids, atoms of different metals arrange into specific, often complex geometries that look nothing like the pure metals. A key open question is how these atomic arrangements determine a material's properties, and how chemists could control them on purpose.
Why it matters
Intermetallic compounds include superconductors, thermoelectrics, strong magnets and catalysts, but finding new ones is hard because structure and properties are difficult to connect. Principles that link patterns of interatomic forces to material behavior could give chemists and materials scientists guidelines for discovering and designing new metallic materials with useful electrical, thermal, magnetic or catalytic properties.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jian Wang
Wichita State University, KS·Materials Science
Tune the magnetic properties of the room-temperature 2D ferromagnet 1T-CrTe2, especially its in-plane spin alignment, by intercalating guest species between its layers using chemical and electrochemical methods.
Allyson Fry-Petit
California State University-Fullerton, CA·Chemistry
Reproduce the reported synthesis of LK-99, the claimed room-temperature superconductor, and use in situ diffraction during the reaction to identify every phase that forms, including unstable intermediates.
Tej Nath Lamichhane
University of Central Oklahoma, OK·Materials Science
Synthesize new cerium compounds containing transition metals and heavy chalcogen elements such as selenium or tellurium, using crystal growth and solid-state reactions, to search for unusual electronic states.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
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