| Abstract: | Continuing developmental work into optical dating has led to some clarification of the optical behaviour of quartz and feldspar sediment extracts. We have verified the key assumption intrinsic to the method — that the optical signal is zeroed completely upon exposure to daylight. We also show that the rate of zeroing in optical dating is much more rapid than it is in TL dating.Studies concerned with the extraction of the thermally stable signal from laboratory-irradiated samples showed that problems may arise from medium-to-high-temperature preheating of young samples. Optical alternatives to thermal stabilization were tested using dye and krypton lasers. Using a krypton laser we have succeeded in obtaining an equivalent dose of 0.0 ± 0.7 Gy for the quartz from a modern intertidal sand, and an average dose of 120 ± 22 Gy for the feldspar extract of a 70 ka sand unit. Both were obtained using six wavelengths, from the infrared to the violet, and no dependence on wavelength was found. We found that the photon energies of infrared and deep red light can stimulate luminescence in unirradiated quartz and feldspar extracts of sediments. This was not expected, and suggests that the process of trap emptying is more complex than we had envisioned, but implies a far greater than expected degree of technical flexibility for the optical dating method. |
