Investigations on standardized growth curve (SGC) procedure for optical dating of heated quartz

When an equivalent dose value (De) is estimated by using a conventional OSL-SAR method, it is necessary to make growth curves of all the aliquots used for De estimation. However, the technique using standardized growth curve (SGC) has an advantage in that, once a standardized growth curve is defined, an equivalent dose value can be quickly obtained by using information from the natural luminescence signal only. In this study, we investigate the SGC technique with naturally dosed quartz samples from Korea that were originally zeroed by heating. Our study reveals that quartz samples from the same location appear to have very similar growth curve parameters, regardless of the sampling points in an outcrop, but quartz aliquots from different locations (i.e., sample locations that are a long distance apart) show significant inter-aliquot variations in growth curve shapes. In addition, for samples from the same location, the equivalent doses obtained by SGC technique were consistent with those estimated by SAR protocol. (author)