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

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_S-value as E ₀/N_p an average energy dissipated to emit a scintillation photon, if the energy of radiation E_o is completely absorbed in material and the number of scintillation photons N_p are emitted. They have attempted to determine N_p in liquid xenon due to alpha-particles with an energy of 5.303 MeV from ²¹⁰Po to estimate W_S for scintillation in liquid xenon. The absolute scintillation yield was obtained as 3.26×10⁵ 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