Scintillation decay-time constants for alpha particles and electrons in liquid xenon.

Understanding liquid xenon scintillation and ionization processes is of great interest to improve analysis methods in current and future detectors. In this paper, we investigate the dynamics of the scintillation process for excitation by O(10 keV) electrons from a 83mKr source and O(6 MeV) α-particles from a 222Rn source, both mixed with the xenon target. The single photon sampling method is used to record photon arrival times in order to obtain the corresponding time distributions for different applied electric fields between about 0.8 V cm-1 to 1.2 kV cm-1. Energy and field dependencies of the signals, which are observed in the results, are discussed.