Most of the chemical processes that occur in nature take place in liquid media. For this reason, chemical reactions in solution have been widely studied for many years. Such studies have focused mainly on the mechanism of the reactions, whilst the structures of the species involved have received considerably less attention. This is mainly due to the difficulties of determining experimentally the structures of chemical species in liquid media. To date, this important question has largely been addressed by the standard techniques of UV-Vis and infrared spectroscopies. Unfortunately these techniques are seldom structurally specific, so the determination of the detailed chemical form of the majority of reactants has awaited the arrival of a fast and more structurally-focused method. Energy dispersive X-ray absorption spectroscopy (EDXAS), is ideal for this new class of experiments.

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Peer reviewed