Potential of establishing a ‘global standardised growth curve’ (gSGC) for optical dating of quartz from sediments

• We investigate quartz OSL growth curves for sediment samples from different regions.
• A new method of normalising growth curves is proposed for single aliquots of quartz.
• We refer to this regenerative-dose normalisation procedure as ‘re-normalisation’.
• We find a common re-normalised growth curve up to ∼250 Gy for different samples.
• A global standardised growth curve (gSGC) is constructed for quartz OSL signals.

We report investigations of the optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) signals of sedimentary quartz from different regions of Asia, Africa, Europe and North America using a single-aliquot regenerative-dose (SAR) procedure. We show that variations in the shape of dose response curves (DRCs), or growth curves, of the test dose sensitivity-corrected OSL signals among single aliquots composed of multiple grains can be greatly reduced by normalising the DRCs using one of the regenerative dose OSL signals. We refer to this regenerative-dose normalisation procedure as ‘re-normalisation’. We find a common re-normalised DRC extends to doses of ∼250 Gy for samples that differ significantly in terms of geological provenance, sedimentary context and depositional age. This feature permits the development of a ‘global standardised growth curve’ (gSGC) for OSL signals from single aliquots of quartz. The equivalent dose (De) of an aliquot can be estimated from the natural signal, one regenerative dose signal and their corresponding test dose signals. For the variety of samples investigated, we find that De estimates obtained from the gSGC are consistent with those obtained using full SAR procedures for doses of up to ∼250 Gy. Use of the gSGC for single aliquots would greatly reduce the time required to estimate the De values of older samples and for a large number of aliquots.