New insight into printable europium doped yttrium borate luminescent pigment for security ink application

Counterfeiting has turned out to be a major area of concern these days and is becoming a serious problem worldwide. Modern technological advances have made counterfeiting of sophisticated products easy. Therefore, it is essential to search new luminescent materials to combat counterfeiting. Herein, we report that a highly luminescent YBO3:Eu3+ phosphor was synthesized by the sol-gel technique, which can be scaled up to 1 kg in a single batch at the laboratory level. This highly luminescent boron based YBO3:Eu3+ phosphor is optically active and is structurally and chemically stable. It has a particle size of similar to 110 +/- 10 nm, which provides a strong orange-red emission at 591 nm upon 245 nm excitation wavelength and is also excitable in the range of 280-480 nm excitation wavelengths. The structural/microstructural and photoluminescence (PL) behaviors were characterized by scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy/high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, and fluorescent spectroscopy. Furthermore, this phosphor was used to design luminescent security ink with a commercially available polyvinyl chloride gold medium for printing of security codes as investigated by photoluminescence (PL) mapping instruments. Thus, this facile method to synthesize a low-cost YBO3:Eu3+ phosphor based security ink offers a non-replicable security code for printing that can be easy to detect but is difficult to counterfeit. Published under license by AIP Publishing.