ROTATIONAL SPECTROSCOPY OF THE EXCITED VIBRATIONAL STATES OF $HNO_{3}$

Author Institution: Department of Physics, Duke University; Department of Physics, University of North Carolina at Asheville; Department of Physics, University of South AlabamaThis talk will report our work on the millimeter and submillimeter rotational structure of the $\nu_{9}, \nu_{8}, \nu_{7}$, and $\nu_{6}$ vibrational states as well as extensions to our earlier work on the ground state. A large amount of data has been obtained and has been fit to Watson's reduced centrifugal distortion Hamiltonian. For each state the nns deviation of the fits was approximately that of the accuracy of the experimental data. For the $\nu_{9}$ spectrum, structure due to the torsional splitting was resolved. The details of this will be discussed in another talk in this symposium