Low cost technology for the fabrication of anti-counterfeiting microtaggants

One of the most important responsibility of manufacturers is to protect their products against counterfeiting. Currently there are a large variety of protection methods based on security tags that can be attached to the products such as holographic labels, nanoparticles, encrypted messages, barcodes etc. The research in this area focuses on the possibility of adding extra security elements (ex: nanoparticles) or complicating the designs of the classical holographic labels. Here we present a simple and low-cost technology for the fabrication of metal microtaggants with different types of security elements engraved, such as holographic background with different visual effects and micro-texts, and etched alphanumerical elements. The main advantages of these structures are the possibility to combine different types of security elements and the relatively small dimension, in the hundreds of micrometres range, making them significantly hard to identify with the naked eye. Our structures can be incorporated into paints, inks, paper, or simply attached on the surface of the product. (paper)