The Fry-Petit lab is a solid state inorganic lab that focuses on rational material design. This is done by approaching the correlations between the structure and property of materials in three ways. The first aim of our research is to use data mining to better understand the structural driving forces of material properties. This data driven process guides our second aim of synthesis and characterization of materials, both novel and known. Results from data mining have shown that many structures that were structurally characterized previously are not fully understood; improvements in instrumentation will allow us to structurally characterize those materials and finally correlate their properties to structurally related materials. A foundation to understanding structure-property relations is correctly assigning the structure of a material which will be done using in house powder x-ray diffraction, synchrotron diffraction, and neutron diffraction. Optical and vibrational properties of the materials will be probed spectroscopically in house using reflectance, fluorescence, infrared, and Raman. The third aim is to continue the development of a vibrational probe, neutron dynamic pair distribution function analysis (DPDF). DPDF probes the local vibrations of a solid and recent results show that we can analyze the local vibrations with traditional symmetry mode analysis, making this previously complicated technique analogous to infrared and Raman techniques. DPDF measurements are taken by Dr. Fry-Petit and students at Oak Ridge National Lab.
