A Luminescent Pathway for Anti-Counterfeiting of Currency and Forensic Applications
Priyambada Pradhan · Materials research foundations · 2024
Nowadays, issues regarding counterfeit and forensic applications are gradually increasing. For instance, banking, insurance sectors, the drug industry, and university degrees, including different expensive commercial products, are facing counterfeit hitches with fake products. Duplication of the products could be done by simple methods and the replicated product looks genuine that nobody could doubt. So, to prevent these kinds of offensive activities, latent security ink has a great advantage to write secret codes or symbols. Similarly, the effective identification of latent fingerprints in forensic science is crucial for investigations at the crime scene. Latent fingerprints are generally accomplished on many surfaces. However, extraction of these from porous, non-porous, and colored surfaces is not so easy. To resolve the issue, organic/inorganic dyes, pigments, and nano phosphor materials have been used conventionally, due to the characteristics of nano-size, variable colour emission, afterglow, and high chemical stability, which consent the fingerprint recognition on any type of surface for forensic applications. This comprehensive book chapter includes a brief introduction to luminescence, properties of lanthanides, and lanthanide complexes. Extensive literature survey including synthesis and application of lanthanide-based nano phosphors in the areas of anticounterfeit and latent fingerprint extractions. Amongst the numerous techniques, which have been developed to combat counterfeits, visualization of latent fingerprints, security ink, and printing, innovative luminescent materials have been broadly utilized for various applications not only due to high-throughput production, facile design and simple operation but also due to exceptional security properties. Moreover, this chapter provides a systematic comprehensive overview of the latest developments in Ln-doped luminescent materials, plasmonic nanomaterials, quantum dots (QDs) and metal-organic frameworks for their possible use in the above high in demand applications.