The luminescence community benefits from many community-led software packages. Many of these packages assist with data reduction, statistical modelling, or plot production. Few resources, however, are simultaneously “plug-and-play”, meant for simulating luminescence behavior, and aimed at non-specialists.

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In 2020, I published a paper with a series of MATLAB functions that could be used to simulate a variety of simple geologic histories for sand grains or bedrock samples, including burial, heat exposure, and sunlight exposure. While I intended these to be useful for geologists outside of our community to learn about luminescence response to environmental changes, not many people have used them.

 

So now I've developed a prototype GUI based on these functions, which I call the Luminescence Sample Simulator (LuSS). The goal of LuSS is to be simple enough for a non-luminescence expert to use and understand, and flexible enough for a luminescence expert to use for exploratory purposes.

 

LuSS is written in MATLAB and can operate as an app within MATLAB. You can download that installer here. However, it can also be packaged as a stand-alone executable file that relies only on the freely available MATLAB Runtime library. Those files can be downloaded here. In its current form, it can simulate basic sunlight, heat and burial histories for sand grains or cobbles, including a sequence of events. The underlying kinetic parameters can be customized and the user can specify the kinetic order. Simple plots can be visualized and exported. Based on community input, I hope to develop this app into something useful, especially for illustrating how luminescence signals evolve in simple scenarios.

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If you try it out, please let me know where I can make improvements: nathan.brown@uta.edu

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And if you use LuSS in a publication, please reference this paper. Thanks!

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