16 research outputs found

    Challenges of dating quartz OSL samples with saturated grains:Lessons from single-grain analyses of low dose-rate samples from Victoria Falls, Zambia

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    A suite of samples from an extensive aeolian sandscarp near Victoria Falls, Zambia was used to explore several different methods of calculating optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages that account for the effects of saturated quartz grains. Beta dose rate heterogeneity and early OSL signal saturation of the samples exacerbate the impact that saturated grains have on the equivalent dose (De) values calculated. Saturated grains that cannot calculate De values are often rejected but the minimum burial dose information they contain can have a significant impact on a sample's average De value. This study compares multiple techniques for combining luminescence measurements that enables inclusion of this data and their sensitivity to a criterion that rejects grains with early OSL signal saturation. The methods tested are found to have different advantages and disadvantages, but reasonable agreement between the De values they calculate suggests that including data from saturated grains makes a more significant difference to De values calculated than the specific method used to combine the data

    Highly-parallelized simulation of a pixelated LArTPC on a GPU

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    The rapid development of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is allowing the implementation of highly-parallelized Monte Carlo simulation chains for particle physics experiments. This technique is particularly suitable for the simulation of a pixelated charge readout for time projection chambers, given the large number of channels that this technology employs. Here we present the first implementation of a full microphysical simulator of a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) equipped with light readout and pixelated charge readout, developed for the DUNE Near Detector. The software is implemented with an end-to-end set of GPU-optimized algorithms. The algorithms have been written in Python and translated into CUDA kernels using Numba, a just-in-time compiler for a subset of Python and NumPy instructions. The GPU implementation achieves a speed up of four orders of magnitude compared with the equivalent CPU version. The simulation of the current induced on 10^3 pixels takes around 1 ms on the GPU, compared with approximately 10 s on the CPU. The results of the simulation are compared against data from a pixel-readout LArTPC prototype

    Those marvellous millennia: the Middle Stone Age of Southern Africa

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