LONDON: Researchers have made a revolutionary discovery, wherein they have produced microscopic spirals that can be embedded in identity cards, credit cards and currency notes, to check forgery and counterfeiting.
Researchers from the Vanderbilt University have employed nano-spirals, designed by Jed Ziegler, doctoral student at the Naval Research Laboratory, to make the payment techniques foolproof and free of any possible replication. Owing to their unique optical properties, wherein only an optical barcode reader can read them, these microscopic swirls can transform the security infrastructure.
Earlier research has studied these exceptional whirls by arranging distinct nanoparticles in a spiral pattern, just as spirals drawn with a series of dots of ink on a piece of paper. However, the present nano-spirals are much smaller in size, a square array with 100 nano-spirals on a side is less than a hundredth of a millimeter wide.
The researchers found that when these spirals were shrunk down about six million times, the resulting nano-spirals developed unique optical properties, which made it impossible to forge objects having them. Richard Davidson, one of the researchers, experimented with small arrays of gold nano-spirals on a glass substrate made using scanning electron-beam lithography. Silver and platinum nano-spirals could be made in the same way.
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