Students from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee have created gold nano-spirals that will serve as the best countermeasure for counterfeiting.

According to the students, the extremely small spirals made of gold will serve as a potentially efficient information security method to prevent identity theft at a low cost.

The nano-sized spirals are roughly the size of a dime shrunk down 6 million times. They possess unique optical properties and are invisible to the naked eye and.

The students said that these spirals could possibly be added to identity cards, currency, and other valuables to secure information.

The students fabricated the gold archimedian spirals and subjected them to ultrafast lasers in order to characterize their optical properties.

The laser tests were conducted at the Vanderbilt University as well as at the Pacific Northwest National Library, located in Richland, Washington.

Both Roderick Davidson II, Ph.D fellow from the university and Jed Ziegler who is now part of the team at the Naval Research Laboratory, thoroughly studied the optical characteristics and appliance of nano-spirals.

It was found that the spirals manifest unusual optical properties upon shrinking to sizes smaller than the wavelength of invisible light. These properties include blue light emission when illuminated with infrared laser light. This effect is called frequency doubling or harmonic generation.

The spirals were also found to have unique response to polarized laser light. Physics Professor Richard Haglund, director of the research said, “If nano-spirals were embedded in a credit card or identification card, they could be detected by a device comparable to a barcode reader”.