Ordered chaos: scientists have created labels for products that cannot be repeated

A group of scientists have developed a new method that will make it easy to distinguish the original from a fake.

Specialists from the National Research University ITMO, led by senior employee Dmitry Zuev, have learned how to protect goods from fakes using unique labels. He suggested using the so-called “laser ablation” method for their creation – a method of random scattering of nanoparticles.

In the modern world, with the development of industry and technology, ways of copying a particular product are also developing. Therefore, manufacturers mark their products in various ways, protecting them from fakes. However, scammers have learned to forge the markings themselves, because the technology for making “quality marks” eventually becomes easily accessible to unscrupulous competitors. Such “copies” can be potentially dangerous when it comes to drugs or, for example, safety cables. So how can we be 100 percent sure that we have the original in our hands?

ITMO scientists have found a solution to this problem. To do this, they needed silicon and a laser. Taking a silicon wafer, they placed a laser in front of it and acted upon it with a light pulse. The impulse “knocked out” silicon nanoparticles from the plate, forming a unique “pattern”. You can make such a mark in the form of a company logo, as if cut through a stencil. But the very structure of the lines, when magnified through a microscope, will have a unique spread of particles. This effect can be compared to the sand that you decide to pour on a plate. The final pattern can only be seen at the very end, when the last grain of sand falls. It will not work to reproduce exactly the same pattern on another plate.

Silicon was chosen to create new labels precisely because it is readily available and its particles have different colors and the spectrum of these colors is very wide.

Having obtained an “atomic pattern” from it, for example, for packing sweets, specialists study it under a microscope and enter data on the structure, color and “accuracy” of printing into a computer.

Each such parameter turns out to be unique from time to time and, accordingly, increases the degree of protection. The program enters all the information into the database and groups for the subsequent “identification” of a particular product.

Today, a team of scientists is working to expand the list of materials that will subsequently be applied to such technological printing.