Utilizing diamond microparticles to create excessive safety anti-counterfeit labels

Counterfeiting is a significant issue affecting a variety of industries—from medication to electronics, inflicting huge financial losses, posing security issues and placing well being in danger.

Counterfeiters and anti-counterfeiters are actually locked in a technological arms race. Regardless of anti-counterfeiting instruments turning into increasingly more high-tech—together with holograms, thermochromic ink and radio frequency identification tags, faux merchandise have gotten tougher and tougher to inform other than the real articles as a result of counterfeiters are utilizing more and more superior expertise.

Lately, a crew of researchers led by Dr. Zhiqin Chu of the Division of Electrical and Digital Engineering of the College of Hong Kong (HKU), along with Professor Lei Shao of the Faculty of Electronics and Info Expertise of Solar Yat-sen College, and Professor Qi Wang from Dongguan Institute of Opto-Electronics of Peking College developed a pioneering technological answer that counterfeiters don’t have any response to.

Dr. Chu’s crew created diamond-based anti-counterfeiting labels which can be distinctive and recognized within the business as PUFs—Bodily Unclonable Capabilities.

The crew made these labels by planting tiny synthetic diamonds—often known as diamond microparticles, on a silicon plate utilizing a way referred to as Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD).

The diamond microparticles, all totally different in form and measurement, kind a singular sample after they scatter on the silicon substrate. Such sample is unimaginable to duplicate and due to this fact scatters mild in a singular means. Put merely, it kinds a singular “fingerprint” than will be scanned utilizing a cellphone.

The second stage of uniqueness, and therefore safety, comes from the truth that these diamond microparticles have defects often known as silicon-vacancy (SiV) facilities.

SiVs give diamond microparticles a singular optical property—they emit near-infrared photoluminescence when a inexperienced mild is shone on them, which makes them simply identifiable. These distinctive optic signatures can then be mixed and digitized into codes of very excessive sophistication and safety that may be learn by a easy smartphone scanner and/or a confocal fluorescence microscope.

Very importantly, these diamond-based labels are extremely appropriate for the use in business merchandise as they’re extraordinarily robust—within the trials they withstood warmth, the motion of chemical compounds and bodily harm.

And, they’re low cost—it prices only one US greenback to make 10,000 such labels of 200 µm × 200 µm dimensions. Furthermore, as a result of they’re constructed from diamonds, these anti-copying labels would improve the worth of the product.

The labels are prepared for use commercially, says Dr. Chu, including that the crew’s subsequent step is “to deal with the sensible utility.”

“Diamond anti-counterfeiting will likely be favored in numerous high-end merchandise reminiscent of jewellery, luxurious items, digital merchandise, and cars,” he stated.

The paper is printed within the journal Nature Communications.