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Magnetic ordering in mackinawite (tetragonal FeS): evidence for strong itinerant spin fluctuations

Mackinawite is a naturally-occurring layer type FeS mineral well-known to be important in biogeochemical cycles and, more recently, to the development of microbial fuel cells. Conflicting results have been published as to the magnetic properties of this mineral, with Mössbauer spectroscopy indicating no magnetic ordering and density functional theory predicting an antiferromagnetic ground state, similar to the Fe-based high-temperature superconductors with which it is isostructural and for which it is known that magnetism is suppressed by strong itinerant spin fluctuations. We investigated this latter possibility for mackinawite using photoemission spectroscopy (PES), near-edge X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy (XAS), and density functional theory (DFT) computations. Our Fe 3s core-level PES spectrum of mackinawite showed a clear exchange-energy splitting (2.9 eV) consistent with a 1 μB magnetic moment on the Fe ions, while the Fe L-edge XAS spectrum indicated rather delocalized Fe 3d electrons in mackinawite similar to those in Fe metal. DFT computations demonstrated that the ground state of mackinawite is single-stripe antiferromagnetic, with an Fe magnetic moment (2.7 μB) that is significantly larger than the experimental estimate and has a strong dependence on the S height and lattice parameters. All of these trends signal the existence of strong itinerant spin fluctuations.If strong spin fluctuations prove to be the mediators of electron pairing in these Fe-based superconductors, we conjecture that mackinawite may be one of the simplest Fe-based superconductors.