On the Stable Ground State of Mackinawite

Mackinawite is a layer type iron monosulfide (FeS) with stacked sheets of edge-sharing FeS4 tetrahedra. An important player in iron and sulfur cycles, mackinawite is one of the first-formed metastable iron sulfides in anoxic environments, transforming into greigite (Fe3S4) and pyrite (FeS2) minerals or elemental sulfur (S0) and iron (Fe0) depending on redox conditions. Mackinawite also affects the mobility and oxidation states of toxic metals such as As, Hg, and Se. The mineral, typically found as a nanoparticle, has been characterized experimentally. Its fundamental conducting and magnetic properties, however, are still controversial; e.g., whether mackinawite is metallic and whether it has magnetic order. Mackinawite is believed to be metallic and without magnetic ordering down at 4 K based on Mössbauer spectroscopy studies. We examined these two issues by applying plane-wave density functional theory (DFT) to FeS geometry optimization under different magnetic orderings. We found that antiferromagnetic ordering among the Fe atoms is the stable ground state of mackinawite. In this presentation, we shall discuss this result and how it relates to previous experimental work.