Coupled X-ray Absorption/UV-vis Monitoring of a Prototypical Oscillating Reaction

Oscillating reactions are among the most intriguing phenomena in chemistry, but many questions on their mechanisms still remain unanswered, due to their intrinsic complexity and to the low sensitivity of the most common spectroscopic techniques toward the reaction brominated species. In this work, we investigate the cerium ion-catalyzed Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) oscillating reaction by means of time-resolved X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), in combination with UV-vis spectroscopy and unsupervised machine learning, multivariate curve resolution, and kinetic analyses. Altogether, we provide new insights into the collective oscillatory behavior of the key brominated species involved in the classical BZ reaction and measure previously unreported oscillations in their concentrations through Br K-edge XAS, while simultaneously tracking the oscillatory Ce⁴⁺-to-Ce³⁺ transformation by coupling XAS with UV-vis spectroscopy. Our work evidences the potential of the XAS technique to investigate the mechanisms of oscillatory chemical systems whose species are often not detectable with conventional experimental methods.