  Iron-based superconductors have been found to exhibit an intimate interplay
of orbital, spin, and lattice degrees of freedom, dramatically affecting their
low-energy electronic properties, including superconductivity. Albeit the
precise pairing mechanism remains unidentified, several candidate interactions
have been suggested to mediate the superconducting pairing, both in the orbital
and in the spin channel. Here, we employ optical spectroscopy (OS),
angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), ab initio band-structure,
and Eliashberg calculations to show that nearly optimally doped
NaFe$_{0.978}$Co$_{0.022}$As exhibits some of the strongest orbitally selective
electronic correlations in the family of iron pnictides. Unexpectedly, we find
that the mass enhancement of itinerant charge carriers in the strongly
correlated band is dramatically reduced near the $\Gamma$ point and attribute
this effect to orbital mixing induced by pronounced spin-orbit coupling.
Embracing the true band structure allows us to describe all low-energy
electronic properties obtained in our experiments with remarkable consistency
and demonstrate that superconductivity in this material is rather weak and
mediated by spin fluctuations.
