Greetings from the Fredrickson Group! We are a research group in the Chemistry Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison focusing on the structural chemistry of alloys and intermetallic compounds. When we think about metals, images of simple sphere packings usually come to mind, such as the body-centered cubic, face-centered cubic and hexagonally close-packed structures. Such images describe well the structures of most of the elemental metals, but do little justice to the structural diversity that arises when we start mixing these metals together to form compounds - a diversity which rivals that of molecular chemistry. A few examples: the unit cells of NaCd2, Cd3Cu4, and Al3Mg2 all contain more than 1000 atoms, while the structure of the quasicrystal YbCd5.7 defies all attempts at reduction to a 3D unit cell.

In the following pages, you can find more examples of this diversity and complexity in the descriptions of some specific projects we are working on. All of these projects involve a close interplay between electronic structure theory, solid state synthesis, and crystallography. All of them also point toward the two intertwined goals of our group's research: an understanding of the chemical bonding principles underlying these structures and a theoretical framework for the design of new metallic materials.