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We conducted a first-principles study of FeCl2, focusing on the significance of strong electron correlations using the GGA+U approximation and van der Waals (vdW) interactions to enhance its physicochemical properties description. Our results provide an excellent characterization of both the bulk CdCl2-type structure and the 2D phase 1T crystal structure. We found that both phases were elastically and dynamically stable, showing good agreement with the experimental data from IR, Raman, inelastic neutron scattering, and magnetic measurements. The impact of the FeCl2 dimensionality is discussed in detail. Additionally, we investigated the less-explored distorted 1T phase (1T’), where structural distortions introduce anisotropies that notably affect its properties, particularly its semiconducting behavior. Moreover, our analysis of the magnon spectrum aligns with the recently characterized magnetic properties of the FM 1T phase. Simultaneously, magnetic anisotropy calculations revealed that the 1T’ configuration exhibits greater stability in the presence of an external magnetic field. 

Abstract In particle collider experiments, elementary particle interactions with large momentum transfer produce quarks and gluons (known as partons) whose evolution is governed by the strong force, as described by the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) 1 . These partons subsequently emit further partons in a process that can be described as a parton shower 2 , which culminates in the formation of detectable hadrons. Studying the pattern of the parton shower is one of the key experimental tools for testing QCD. This pattern is expected to depend on the mass of the initiating parton, through a phenomenon known as the dead-cone effect, which predicts a suppression of the gluon spectrum emitted by a heavy quark of mass m Q and energy E , within a cone of angular size m Q / E around the emitter 3 . Previously, a direct observation of the dead-cone effect in QCD had not been possible, owing to the challenge of reconstructing the cascading quarks and gluons from the experimentally accessible hadrons. We report the direct observation of the QCD dead cone by using new iterative declustering techniques 4,5 to reconstruct the parton shower of charm quarks. This result confirms a fundamental feature of QCD. Furthermore, the measurement of a dead-cone angle constitutes a direct experimental observation of the non-zero mass of the charm quark, which is a fundamental constant in the standard model of particle physics.