“…Although its roots lie in ultra-high vacuum (UHV) studies of solids and their interactions with the gas phase (Chen, 1997;Tamenori, 2013), NEXAFS with soft X-rays has emerged as a versatile analytical tool for a broad range of applications, with near-ambient pressure operation facilitating even operando or in situ analysis of materials. Contemporary applications span both fundamental and applied research, including fields such as catalysis (Eren et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2023;Tolosana-Moranchel et al, 2023), studies of liquids (Smith & Saykally, 2017), corrosion (Dwivedi et al, 2017), biological materials (Akabayov et al, 2005), batteries and electrolytes (Yang & Devereaux, 2018;Ye et al, 2017;Swallow et al, 2023a), ionic liquids (Fogarty et al, 2017;Seymour et al, 2022), molecular orientation at surfaces (Dover et al, 2020;Stoodley et al, 2023), art conservation (Willneff et al, 2014), local bonding of organic molecules in crystals (Edwards et al, 2022), speciation in solution (Stevens et al, 2015) and geochemistry (Koike et al, 2020).…”