Research Projects

Security tags are critical in combating counterfeiting, ensuring high-valued product authenticity in the market and cross-border transport, and safeguarding sensitive documents. Conventional security tags often rely on radio-frequency identification, electronics, encrypted barcodes, optical watermarks, visible color-coded markers, and static holograms. With the technological advancements these security features became potentially vulnerable to replication with advanced printing technologies and tampered digital decoding devices. Electronic-based tags suffer from certain drawbacks such as electromagnetic interference malfunction, metallic shielding, and containing non-recyclable materials thus, they cannot be considered a sustainable solution. On the other hand, conventional optical security tags are limited to large form factors to accommodate the Fourier realm and neglected degrees of freedom of lightwave, such as amplitude, phase, dichroism, polarization, nonlinear effects etc. Advancements in nanofabrication technologies overcome the technological realization boundaries leading to the integration of multi-optical elements on a single substrate. This research proposes the development of flexible, next-generation security tags based on four key optical elements such as engineered gratings, metasurfaces, quantum dots, and light-guiding waveguides. By leveraging these cutting-edge technologies, the proposed security tags will offer unparalleled optical complexity resistance to forgery. The project aims to design and optimize the optical elements and provide a set of concepts. These concepts will be then realized with the advanced nanofabrication processes, and finally, a set of prototypes will be developed that can be used as lightweight compact security tags. adaptable to diverse application areas, and scalable for mass production.