Cited row: ground state of hydrogen bromide, and . The isotope designation in this table is H81Br. These constants characterize low vibrational levels; an exact global Morse potential is a further modelling assumption.
The molecule with the larger inferred dissociation energy is assigned the stronger hydrogen–halogen bond: and . Moving from bromine to the larger iodine atom generally lengthens the bond and reduces effective overlap with the compact hydrogen orbital, so hydrogen iodide is more weakly bound. Independently, the tabulated ground-state harmonic constants near for hydrogen bromide and for hydrogen iodide agree with the inferred assignment.[ref][ref] The ordering is the identification criterion; the low-level Morse oscillator extrapolations above should not be presented as measured dissociation energies.