New ground-state measurements of ethyl cyanide

Abstract

The spectrum of ethyl cyanide, or propionitrile (CH3CH 2CN), has been repeatedly observed in the interstellar medium with large column densities and surprisingly high temperatures in hot core sources. The construction of new, more sensitive, observatories accessing higher frequencies such as Herschel, ALMA, and SOFIA have made it important to extend the laboratory data for ethyl cyanide to coincide with the capabilities of the new instruments. We report extensions of the laboratory measurements of the rotational spectrum of ethyl cyanide in its ground vibrational state to 1.6 THz. A global analysis of the ground state, which includes all of the previous data and 3356 newly assigned transitions, has been fitted to within experimental error to J = 132, K = 36, using both Watson A-reduced and Watson S-reduced Hamiltonians. © 2009 The American Astronomical Society.