New ground-state measurements of ethyl cyanide

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 1.6THz. 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.