The rotational spectrum of nitric acid - The first five vibrational states

The details of work on the nu(8) vibrational state, which arise from the NO2 out-of-plane vibration, are reported. For this state, over 210 transitions have been measured in the millimeter and submillimeter spectral region and analyzed with Watson's A-reduced centrifugal distortion Hamiltonian. Also included in this work is a comparison of all these spectra and an overview of the millimeter and submillimeter spectra associated with these states. Although at the high sensitivity available in laboratory experiments, many additional lines are observable, all arise from vibrational states whose populations are more than 100 times lower than the ground state. The most prominent of these are due to the states which give rise to the perturbed 2 nu(9) and nu(5) bands near 11 microns. These results provide a significant data base for both atmospheric remote sensing experiments and spectral analyses of data in other spectral regions, especially the IR.