Bromic acid

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Bromic acid, also called hydrogen bromate, is an oxoacid with the formula HBrO3. It only exists in water (aqueous) solutions. It is colorless, but at room temperature it slowly turns yellow as it decomposes to bromine. Bromic acid and bromates are strong oxidizers and appear in Belousov–Zhabotinsky reactions, a classic example of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. In these reactions, at low concentrations bromic acid fully dissociates to hydronium and bromate, while at high concentrations it decomposes to bromine. The instability of bromic acid is due to the positively charged, hypervalent bromine bonded to an OH group. There are several isomers of HBrO3, with HOBrO2 being the most stable. Bromic acid can be made by reacting barium bromate with sulfuric acid; the barium sulfate precipitates, and the remaining solution contains bromic acid, which can be decanted to separate it.