SBIR Phase II: Universal Nanoparticle Taggants

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will provide a system that is capable of easily labeling documents, with millions of unique optical signatures that provide a means of distinguishing these documents from other similar objects. Since there are no suitable commercial alternatives, both a scanning spectrometer and hyperspectral imaging system will be constructed and evaluated. The compatibility of developed materials with current screening technology, and the large number of distinct resolvable optical codes available, provides a level of authentication that will be difficult to replicate or decrypt. Since there is a strong and continuing need to authenticate and verify documents, objects or people, the benefits of this technology will be broad-based and will influence authentication, sorting and identification of many items such as documents, pharmaceuticals or biological samples. The commercially available multiplexing level (number of distinguishable optical signatures) for optical encoding technology is currently limited to 100, so there is immediate need for a technology to provide a means of optically distinguishing very large numbers of similar objects.