Competition between Organics and Bromide at the Aqueous Solution–Air Interface as Seen from Ozone Uptake Kinetics and X‑ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy

A more detailed understanding of the heterogeneous chemistry of halogenated species in the marine boundary layer is required. Here, we studied the reaction of ozone (O₃) with NaBr solutions in the presence and absence of citric acid (C₆H₈O₇) under ambient conditions. Citric acid is used as a proxy for oxidized organic material present at the ocean surface or in sea spray aerosol. On neat NaBr solutions, the observed kinetics is consistent with bulk reaction-limited uptake, and a second-order rate constant for the reaction of O₃ + Br^– is 57 ± 10 M^–1 s^–1. On mixed NaBr–citric acid aqueous solutions, the uptake kinetics was faster than that predicted by bulk reaction-limited uptake and also faster than expected based on an acid-catalyzed mechanism. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) on a liquid microjet of the same solutions at 1.0 × 10^–3–1.0 × 10^–4 mbar was used to obtain quantitative insight into the interfacial composition relative to that of the bulk solutions. It revealed that the bromide anion becomes depleted by 30 ± 10% while the sodium cation gets enhanced by 40 ± 20% at the aqueous solution–air interface of a 0.12 M NaBr solution mixed with 2.5 M citric acid in the bulk, attributed to the role of citric acid as a weak surfactant. Therefore, the enhanced reactivity of bromide solutions observed in the presence of citric acid is not necessarily attributable to a surface reaction but could also result from an increased solubility of ozone at higher citric acid concentrations. Whether the acid-catalyzed chemistry may have a larger effect on the surface than in the bulk to offset the effect of bromide depletion also remains open