We report a study on the hydrogen-bond network of water in aqueous LiCl solutions using X-ray Raman scattering (XRS) spectroscopy. A wide concentration range of 0-17 mol/kg was covered. We find that the XRS spectral features change systematically at low concentrations and saturate at 11 mol/kg. This behavior suggests a gradual destruction in the hydrogen-bond network until the saturation concentration. The surprisingly large concentration required for the saturation supports an interpretation in which the ions affect the structure of water only within their first hydration shell. The study is complemented by density-functional-theory calculations and molecular dynamics simulations.

We report a study on the temperature dependence of the core-electron excitation spectra of CO2 and N2, performed using non-resonant inelastic X-ray scattering spectroscopy. The spectra were measured at two temperatures (300 K and 850 K) and at high pressure (40 bar). For CO2 a clear temperature dependence was observed at the C and O near-edge regions. The spectra of CO2 were simulated by density functional theory calculations, and the temperature was accounted for by sampling the initial state molecular geometries using the Metropolis algorithm. This model is able to account for the experimentally observed temperature dependence of the spectrum. The experiment fortifies the status of the non-resonant inelastic X-ray scattering spectroscopy as a valuable technique for physics and chemistry for in situ studies under extreme sample conditions. Especially in the case of gas phase the sample conditions of considerably elevated temperature and pressure are unfeasible for many other spectroscopic techniques.

In this paper we report an X-ray emission study of bulk aqueous sulfuric acid. Throughout the range of molarities from 1 M to 18 M the sulfur Kβ emission spectra from H2SO4 (aq) depend on the molar fractions and related deprotonation of H2SO4. We compare the experimental results with results from emission spectrum calculations based on atomic structures of single molecules and structures from ab initio molecular dynamics simulations. We show that the S Kβ emission spectrum is a sensitive probe of the protonation state of the acid molecules. Using non-negative matrix factorization we are able to extract the fractions of different protonation states in the spectra, and the results are in good agreement with the simulation for the higher part of the concentration range.