AUTHOR=Mo Hongwei , Peng Jun , Li Zhenguo , Song Yan , Feng Teng 

TITLE=On the Bleaching Degree of Multi-Grain Coarse Quartz OSL Signal of Near-Surface Aeolian Sediments Around the Tengger Desert: Empirical Investigation and Numerical Validation

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Earth Science

VOLUME=10

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/10.3389/feart.2022.922692

DOI=10.3389/feart.2022.922692

ISSN=2296-6463

ABSTRACT=<p>In this study, the degree of bleaching of multi-grain coarse quartz optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) signal of near-surface aeolian samples collected around the Tengger Desert is assessed. The single-aliquot regenerative dose (SAR) protocol and the standardized growth curve (SGC) method are applied to measure the equivalent dose (D<sub>e</sub>) of these samples. The bleaching degree of the samples is assessed by investigating 1) the relationship between L<sub>n</sub>/T<sub>n</sub> and SAR D<sub>e</sub> and 2) the SGC D<sub>e</sub> distribution. Various degrees of heterogeneously-bleached multi-grain dose distributions synthetized with a numerical simulation method is further used to validate the bleaching performance of the samples. It demonstrates that the investigated samples are characterized by tight D<sub>e</sub> distributions and the maximum D<sub>e</sub> estimate is smaller than 1.1 Gy. The numerical simulation method which uses as input a large proportion of fully-bleached grains and a small baseline dose is able to reproduce multi-grain D<sub>e</sub> distributions similar to the measured ones. We conclude that OSL signals of multi-grain coarse quartz extracted from most of the investigated aeolian samples are fully bleached before deposition.</p>