h i g h l i g h t sDiscrepancy between quartz SAR-OSL ages obtained on fine and coarse grains. Dose response curve adequately fitted by a sum of two saturating exponentials. Isothermal decay fitted by a single exponential. Clear dependency between the saturation characteristics (D 0 s) and the quartz grain size. No correlation between the 2 D 0 value and the maximum attainable accurate equivalent dose. a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c tThere are two major problems commonly encountered when applying Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating in the high dose range: (i) age discrepancy between different grain sizes, and (ii) age underestimation. A marked and systematic discrepancy between fine-grain (4e11 mm) and coarse-grain (63e90 mm) quartz single aliquot regeneration protocol (SAR) ages has been reported previously for Romanian and Serbian loess >40 ka (D e of~100 Gy), generally with fine-grain ages underestimating the depositional age. In this paper, we show a similar age pattern for two grain size fractions from Chinese loess, thus pointing to a potential worldwide phenomenon. While age underestimation is often attributed to signal saturation problems, this is not the case for fine grain material, which saturates at higher doses than coarse grains, yet begins to underestimate true ages earlier. Here we examine the dose response curves of quartz from different sedimentary contexts around the world, using a range of grain sizes (diameters of 4e11 mm, 11e30 mm, 35e50 mm, 63e90 mm, 90e125 mm, 125e180 mm, and 180 e250 mm). All dose response curves can be adequately described by a sum of two saturating exponential functions, whose saturation characteristics (D 0 values) are clearly anticorrelated with grain diameter (4) through an inverse square root relationship, D 0 ¼ A/√4, where A is a scaling factor. While the mechanism behind this grain-size dependency of saturation characteristics still needs to be understood, our results show that the observation of an extended SAR laboratory dose response curve does not necessarily enable high doses to be recorded accurately, or provide a corresponding extended age range.