Low temperature magnetic properties of monoclinic pyrrhotite with particular relevance to the Besnus transition

Monoclinic pyrrhotite (Fe7S8) is an important mineral on earth as well as in some meteorites. It owes its ferrimagnetism to an ordered array of Fe vacancies. Its magnetic properties change markedly around 30 K, in what is known as the Besnus transition. Plausible explanations for the Besnus transition are either due to changes in crystalline anisotropy from a transformation in crystal symmetry or from the establishment of a two-phase system with magnetic interaction between the two phases. To help resolve this discrepancy, we measured hysteresis loops every 5° and back field curves every 10° in the basal plane of an oriented single crystal of monoclinic pyrrhotite at 300 K and at 21 temperature steps from 50 K through the Besnus transition until 20 K. Between 50 and 30 K, hysteresis loops possess double inflections between crystallographic a-axes and only a single inflection parallel to the a-axes. The second inflection phenomenon and relative differences of the loops show a six-fold symmetry in this temperature range. The Besnus transition is best characterized by changes in magnetic remanence and coercivity over a 6° temperature span with a maximum rate of change at 30 K. A surprising yet puzzling finding is that the coercivity ratio becomes less than unity below the transition when four-fold symmetry arises. The saturation magnetization of natural pyrrhotite cycled from room temperature to successively lower temperatures through the Besnus transition decreases 2-4 times less than equivalent grain sizes of magnetite, with less than a 10% loss in remanence between 300 K and 150 K in pseudo-single domain pyrrhotite. As pseudo-single domain monoclinic pyrrhotite carries the magnetic remanence in some meteorites, it is likely that low temperature cycling in space to the Earth's surface will have only a minor influence on paleointensity values derived from those meteorites.