Probing the Accretion Timescales in Tidal Disruption Events with ZTF and XMM

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is poised to produce the first statisticallysignificant sample of tidal disruption events (TDEs) from a single survey.However, despite this exciting progress in assembling large samples of TDEs, thenature of their optical emission remains a mystery. One of the physical modelsthat is gaining ground is that the optical component originates from alargerscale structure associated with streamstream collisions of the boundstellar debris, distinct from the newly formed debris disk powering the softXray emission. With this XMMNewton program, we aim to test this model bymeasuring the evolution of the optical to Xray ratio for a large sample of TDEsdiscovered promptly after disruption for the first time. truncated!, Please see actual data for full text [truncated!, Please see actual data for full text]