Absolute number of scintillation photons in liquid xenon by alpha-particles

Abstract

To apply scintillation material to radiation detectors, a quantity such as the W-value, defined as an average energy expended per ion-pair in gaseous detectors, must be determined experimentally. The authors define the effective W/sub S/-value as E/sub 0//N/sub p/ an average energy dissipated to emit a scintillation photon, if the energy of radiation E/sub o/ is completely absorbed in material and the number of scintillation photons N/sub p/ are emitted. They have attempted to determine N/sub p/ in liquid xenon due to alpha-particles with an energy of 5.303 MeV from /sup 210/Po to estimate W/sub S/ for scintillation in liquid xenon. The absolute scintillation yield was obtained as 3.26*10/sup 5/ for alpha-particles for 5.303 MeV in liquid xenon. This result followed from fitting the absolute photo-electron yields measured with a VUV sensitive photomultiplier, which was used as a photodiode, to the results of Monte Carlo simulation. >