Direct inversion of high overtone collision broadened linewidths in the HCl-HCl system: Rotationally inelastic rates for highly vibrationally excited molecules

In this paper we present preliminary results for rotation-rotation inelastic collision rates for HCl molecules in vibrationally excited states up to v=6 colliding with ground state HCl molecules. These were obtained by inverting the measured collision broadened linewidths of overtone vibration-rotation transitions up to the 6-0 overtone band. An energy corrected sudden scaling theory was used to reduce the number of independent parameters sufficiently so that the rates could be determined directly from the available experimental linewidths.