New Delhi: Indian scientists have developed a highly stable and non-toxic security ink from nano-materials that spontaneously emits luminescence due to its unique chemical properties.
The innovators at the Institute of Nano Science and Technology, Mohali believe that with the use of new non-toxic security ink even a common man would be able to find out easily whether the document or a product is original or fake. The new ink has huge potential to combat counterfeiting of branded goods, bank notes, medicine, certificates, currency.
“We have developed non-toxic metal phosphate-based ink with excitation dependent luminescent properties which are highly stable under practical conditions such as temperature, humidity, and light, etc. This work has been published in the journals ‘Crystal Growth and Design’ and ‘Materials Today Communications’,” Dr Sanyasinaidu Boddu the lead researcher said. If these materials are applied for anti-counterfeiting, it will give better encoding, decoding capacity and thereby improve the security ability, he added.
Most of the security inks available today are based on luminescent materials that absorb a high energy photon and emit low energy photon, technically called downshifting, where a covert tag is invisible under daylight, and it becomes visible under UV light. However, these single emission-based tags are prone to replication.
The new luminescent security ink developed by the researcher is based on lanthanide ions doped with nano-materials.
