Quenching of Highly-Rotationally-Excited HCl in Collisions with HE

Abstract: We report rotational quenching cross sections and rate coefficients of HCl due to collisions with He. The close-coupling method and the coupled-states approximation are applied in quantum-mechanical scattering calculations of state-to-state cross sections for HCl with initial rotational levels up to $j=20$ for kinetic energies from 10$^{-5}$ to 15000 cm$^{-1}$. State-to-state rate coefficients for temperature between 0.1 and 3000 K are also presented. Comparison of the present rate coefficients with previous results reported in the literature for lowly-excited rotational levels shows reasonable agreement. Small differences are attributed to the differences in the interaction potential energy surfaces. The uncertainty in the computed cross sections and rate coefficients is estimated by varying the potential well depth. Applications of current results to astrophysical systems are also briefly discussed.