Our life deals with electronic devices every day. We watch TV, use smartphone, and work with computers. Even your favorite car consists of thousands of electronic components. But do you really know these things are genuine or fake? Buying a fake product to use can be dangerous to your life. Now, atomic fingerprinting tech can be applied in goods and protect your life and living quality.
Photo Credit: Lancaster University
This anti-counterfeit tech mostly has two parts of applications: a special molecular pattern that can be used in a holographic label and a smartphone app. An atom-thin layer of material contains flaws. The flaws can be generated by removing carbon atoms or adding oxygen atoms. Once the flaw pattern is decided, the material layer will be combined with ink and output onto a holographic label using an inkjet printer.
If you would like to check the authenticity of a product with this kind of label, just take out your smartphone and use a specific app to flash the label. Then, you will see a unique color based on the atomic pattern. This pattern gives products hard-to-copy identification and effectively reducing the possibility of getting a counterfeit.
The researcher team is going to introduce their tech to the market in 2018. One of their great goals is to apply the tech in drugs. This application can easily stop fake drugs that cause allergic symptoms to lead to death.
"There is no bigger crime than counterfeit crime," said Robert Young, a professor of physics at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom and chief technology officer of the tech startup Quantum Base. You will not like the feeling when you discovered your favorite car is fake! Imagin that your car gets somthing wrong, you would need to buy some componets to fix it. You don not know things you buy are fake or not. It will be pretty dangerous when you are driving at high speend. Fake components will be easily broken again and make your car out of control!