Millimeter-wave and Submillimeter-wave Spectra of Aminoacetonitrile in the Three Lowest Vibrational Excited States

It is important to study possible precursors of amino acids such as glycine to enable future searches in interstellar space. Aminoacetonitrile (NH2CH2CN) is one of the most feasible molecules for this purpose. This molecule was already detected toward Sgr B2(N). Aminoacetonitrile has a few low-lying vibrational excited states, and transitions within these states may be found in space. In this study, the pure-rotational transitions in the three lowest vibrational states in the 80-450 GHz range have been assigned and analyzed. It was found to be very important to include Coriolis coupling between the two lowest vibrational fundamentals, while the third one was unperturbed. The partition function was evaluated considering these new results.