RadialPlotter: a Java application for fission track, luminescence and other radial plots

Single-grain dating has become common practice in fission track, 40Ar/39Ar, U-Pb and luminescence dating. Because single-grain signals are smaller, the measurement uncertainties of single-grain ages are typically larger and more variable than those of multi-grain aliquots of the same sample. Invented by Rex Galbraith in 1988, the radial plot is a graphical method for comparing several estimates that have different precisions.

RadialPlotter is a user-friendly application for generating radial plots. It has the following advantages over existing programs such as Trackkey or MacTrack. (1) The main purpose of the program is to produce radial plots. Therefore, radial plot functions are not buried deep inside the menu structure and the interface is very straightforward. (2) RadialPlotter was written in Java (version 6) and is, therefore, perfectly platform independent. (3) In addition to fission track radial plots, RadialPlotter also offers the possibility to generate radial plots for luminescence dating, or any other kind of data such as (U-Th)/He or U-Pb ages. Hopefully, this will give the radial plot the wider user base it deserves.

Citeable reference:
Vermeesch, P., 2009, RadialPlotter: a Java application for fission track, luminescence and other radial plots, Radiation Measurements, 44, 4, 409-410

downloads
RadialPlotter.jar
Version 3.0 of the program
earlier versions
Example input files
FTdata.csv: Fission Tracks
OSLdata.csv: OSL dose rates