Thermoluminescence (TL) glow curves are widely used in dosimetric studies. Many commercial and free-distributed programs are used to deconvolute TL glow curves. This study introduces an open-source R package tgcd to conduct TL glow curve analysis, such as kinetic parameter estimation, glow peak simulation, and peak shape analysis. TL glow curves can be deconvoluted according to the general-order empirical expression or the semi-analytical expression derived from the one trap-one recombination center (OTOR) model based on the Lambert W function by using a modified Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm from which any of the parameters can be constrained or fixed. The package provides an interactive environment to initialize parameters and offers an automated “trial-and-error” protocol to obtain optimal fit results. First-order, second-order, and general-order glow peaks (curves) are simulated according to a number of simple kinetic models. The package was developed using a combination of Fortran and R programming languages to improve efficiency and flexibility

In luminescence dating, there are various software packages that can be used to do data analysis, such as Analyst, Java RadialPlotter, SigmaplotTM and so on. There is also an open source R package Luminescence, which has the capacity to tackle not only lots of basic statistical analysis but also provide more advanced data treatment. In this article, we present another R package, numOSL, the aim of which is neither to present a comprehensive numeric tool for luminescence dating just as the R package Luminescence did, nor to cover all numeric topics regarding luminescence dating. We focus only on the most frequently encountered numeric problems concerning luminescence dating, including equivalent dose calculation and error estimation, decay signal decomposition, fast-component equivalent dose calculation, and statistical age model optimization. Almost all our code is written in Fortran and is linked to R using an interface in order to improve algorithms, generality and flexibility. This makes it faster and perhaps more powerful when comparing to other numeric software.