Stephen E. Cox

This website will be continually updated to reflect improvements in the neon age calculation software. Currently I am working to speed up the uncertainty calculation.

The calculation of (U-Th)/Ne ages requires a conceptually simple but somewhat difficult calculation using the reaction cross section for the production of neon and the frequencies and energies of alpha particles emitted during the history of the mineral. In order ot facilitate the use of this system, we publish here MATLAB code that enables a user to easily input measured uranium, thorium, and neon concentrations and calculate an age for a given mineral. In addition to the simple gui that provides this functionality, the code has buried within it the ability to produce charts that are useful to those performing a more in-depth study of the (U-Th)/Ne system, and the ability to add new minerals and reactions in the future.

Extract all software to the same folder and run neon_dating_gui to calculate ages.

Version 2.0 (now on Github)I have moved the data reduction code to python. A user-friendly gui to match the MATLAB version is in development

Version 1.0 (published in GCA): Uncertainty calculations are improved and extended to the ratio age calculations as well. The uncertainty calculations are still fairly slow (up to a minute per calculation on slower laptops. The code is tested back to version 2010 of MATLAB. The code currently will not run without something input for uncertainties for the relevant data, but this will be changed soon.

Version 0.9 (beta): This version includes built-in uncertainty propagation for the concentration-based measurements (previously done manually with a separate piece of code and a Monte Carlo approach). The uncertainty includes only measurement uncertainty, which is resampled using a simple bootstrap technique. It still recomputes a lot of unnecessary data, so it remains very slow. This will be fixed in the next version.