Fighting crime with covert nanowires

Lucrative black market trading in jewellery, munitions, art etc necessitates increasingly sophisticated methods to prevent crime. Barcodes are commonplace tags for both everyday and high security items. However, they’re easy to replicate and manipulate.

Now, scientists in China have made invisible barcodes, which could prove useful in the fight against fraud and theft, out of nanowires. 1000 times narrower than a human hair, their covert system is easily encoded, and read, with an electron beam.

This article provides a link to coverage by Chemistry World.