Nanotag luminescent fingerprint anti-counterfeiting technology
- PDF / 756,012 Bytes
- 5 Pages / 595.28 x 793.7 pts Page_size
- 78 Downloads / 183 Views
NANO EXPRESS
Open Access
Nanotag luminescent fingerprint anti-counterfeiting technology Stefan Johansen, Michal Radziwon*, Luciana Tavares and Horst-Günter Rubahn
Abstract We describe a method to fabricate, transfer and validate via image processing nanofibre-based, unique security marks (‘nanotags’) for anti-counterfeiting purposes. Epitaxial surface growth of oligophenylenes on a heated muscovite mica crystal results in a thin film of mutually aligned nanofibres with dimensions of tens of nanometres in height, hundreds of nanometres in width and tens to hundreds of micrometres in length. By applying a shadow mask, a film pattern is generated which contains only sparse, randomly grown nanofibres, which in turn represent a unique ‘fingerprint’ of the growth area. This fingerprint can be transferred on an adhesive tape as a label of a product, imaged using low magnification microscopy, digitalised and stored in a database. Infrared surface heating, enforced cooling and load lock transfer makes the fabrication process fast and scalable to mass production. Keywords: Anti-counterfeit, Organic nanofibres, Molecular beam epitaxy, Process optimisation
Background Counterfeiting is a steady and increasingly more important problem in all kind of commercialised production. Counterfeiting does not only inherently violate intellectual property rights of inventors and producers, but it also induces a real danger potential to customers, e.g. in the case of falsified drugs. A usual approach to anti-counterfeiting is to apply unique markers to the product in question. Unfortunately, readily available, advanced printing technologies provide simple access to high quality counterfeiting of such markers, especially those which are based on holographic patterns [1]. Given this background, it is not surprising that a solution to this problem has to base on the introduction of new technologies which are more difficult to counterfeit. Bottom up nanotechnology is one of these more recent approaches, which can help addressing the problem since it per se can imply a stochastic generation of unique and irreproducible patterns of nanoscaled objects. The principal problem with the use of bottom-up nanotechnology for the generation of unique anti-counterfeiting markers is the inherent optical invisibility of objects that are smaller than half the wavelength of the * Correspondence: [email protected] Nano SYD, Mads Clausen Institute, University of Southern Denmark, Alsion 2, Sønderborg, DK6400, Denmark
imaging light. Hence, the uniqueness of nanomarkers created by tailored nanoscaled objects becomes obvious only if one either employs state-of-the-art imaging technology (e.g. scanning electron or atomic force microscopy) or if one bases the detection on second-order effects, e.g. unique optical appearance as for quantum dots [2]. For the purpose of anti-counterfeiting, it would, of course, be most interesting to have markers; the uniqueness of which can be detected on various identification levels, from bare eye over simple to advanced instr
Data Loading...
