An objective methodology for dose distribution analysis

The advent of single aliquot optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) techniques along with parallel equipment advances have made it possible and practical to obtain statistically meaningful quantities of equivalent dose (D_e) data from individual samples. Now that hundreds of dose determinations can be made for one sample D_e distributions may be scrutinised, leading to the problem of how to make unbiased comparisons among distributions, and how to decide objectively which dose is representative of the age of the deposit. In this paper, an objective analytical method is presented for treating dose distributions, including a mathematically rigorous means of determining a representative equivalent dose and a statistical definition of its corresponding uncertainty. This analytical method has been applied to Holocene aeolian and fluvial quartz sands from Central Oklahoma. The results are compared to equivalent doses determined via other proposed analytical procedures.