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Collisional excitation of HCN by CO to refine the modeling of cometary comae
Francesca Tonolo, Ernesto Quintas-S\'anchez, Adrian Batista-Planas, Richard Dawes, Fran\c{c}ois Lique
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19904

Collisional excitation of HCN by CO to refine the modeling of cometary comae
We present the first dataset of collisional (de)-excitation rate coefficients of HCN induced by CO, one of the main perturbing gases in cometary atmospheres. The dataset spans the temperature range of 5-50 K. It includes both state-to-state rate coefficients involving the lowest ten and nine rotational levels of HCN and CO, respectively, and the so-called "thermalized" rate coefficients over the rotational population of CO at each kinetic temperature. The derivation of these coefficients exploi…