  Two selected regions in the molecular gas spiral arms in M51 were mapped with
the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) mm-interferometer in the 12CO(2-1),
13CO(1-0), C18O(1-0), HCN(1-0) and HCO+(1-0) emission lines. The CO data have
been combined with the 12CO(1-0) data from Aalto et al. (1999) covering the
central 3.5kpc to study the physical properties of the molecular gas. All CO
data cubes were short spacing corrected using IRAM 30m (12CO(1-0): NRO 45m)
single dish data. A large velocity gradient (LVG) analysis finds that the giant
molecular clouds (GMCs) are similar to Galactic GMCs when studied at 180pc
(120pc) resolution with an average kinetic temperature of T_kin = 20(16)K and
H_2 density of n(H_2) = 120(240)cm^(-3) when assuming virialized clouds (a
constant velocity gradient dv/dr. The associated conversion factor between H_2
mass and CO luminosity is close to the Galactic value for most regions
analyzed. Our findings suggest that the GMC population in the spiral arms of
M51 is similar to those of the Milky Way and therefore the strong star
formation occurring in the spiral arms has no strong impact on the molecular
gas in the spiral arms. Extinction inferred from the derived H_2 column density
is very high (A_V about 15 - 30 mag), about a factor of 5-10 higher than the
average value derived toward HII regions. Thus a significant fraction of the
ongoing star formation could be hidden inside the dust lanes of the spiral
arms. A comparison of MIPS 24um and H_alpha data, however, suggests that this
is not the case and most of the GMCs studied here are not (yet) forming stars.
We also present low (4.5") resolution OVRO maps of the HCN(1-0) and HCO+(1-0)
emission at the location of the brightest 12CO(1-0) peak.
