Plasmonic Enhanced Upconversion Nanostructure for Anti-counterfeit Devices

 Anti-counterfeit (AC) technologies developed and achieved with basing on information technology (IT), such as radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips, or Quick Response codes (QR-code). However, IT based AC technologies... [ view full abstract ]

 Anti-counterfeit (AC) technologies developed and achieved with basing on information technology (IT), such as radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips, or Quick Response codes (QR-code). However, IT based AC technologies are essential to connect on communication system, and should accept the intrusion of privacy. Considering the growing demand for user-tailored and personalized security, we applied plasmonic enhanced up-conversion(UC) nanostructure, pMUM(plasmonic Metal /UC nanoparticles/Metal film), to AC technologies.

 The structure of pMUM with noble metal, Silver (Ag), shows great enhancement of UC luminescence (UCL), which emitting visible light via absorbing IR(980nm) ray, whereas UM (UC nanoparticles/Metal film) structure is deprived of luminescence from Ag film because of quenching effect. Taking advantages of the each characteristic of structure, we designed the AC system with pMUM structure which luminesce green light from UC particles while illuminating IR and when it destruct as UM structure, make it unable to find luminescence. The destruction and separation of pM from the nano-scaled structure could easily performed with scotch tape as Figure 1(a), and to avoid revert of AC system after tape detachment, the system made to flow in pollutant such as liquid PDMS to gap between detached tape and substrate. This AC system could alert the seal broken of cases or envelops and could be used as protection seal to obstruct the bottle abuse in such as counterfeit medications.

 We adopted randomized Ag nanowires and Ag particles on pMUM structure as pM for the great enhancement of UCL, and several patterning steps are attempted to encode the real pattern to advance the security level. Luminescence enhanced with high security level of AC system will be reported on conference.