One of the most important responsibility of manufacturers is to protect their products against counterfeiting. Currently there are a large variety of protection methods based on security tags that can be attached to the products such as holographic labels, nanoparticles, encrypted messages, barcodes etc. The research in this area focuses on the possibility of adding extra security elements (ex: nanoparticles) or complicating the designs of the classical holographic labels. Here we present a simple and low-cost technology for the fabrication of metal microtaggants with different types of security elements engraved, such as holographic background with different visual effects and micro-texts, and etched alphanumerical elements. The main advantages of these structures are the possibility to combine different types of security elements and the relatively small dimension, in the hundreds of micrometres range, making them significantly hard to identify with the naked eye. Our structures can be incorporated into paints, inks, paper, or simply attached on the surface of the product.

制造商最重要的责任之一就是保护其产品免受伪造。当前，有很多基于安全标签的保护方法可以附加到产品上，例如全息标签，纳米颗粒，加密消息，条形码等。该领域的研究集中于添加额外安全元素的可能性（例如：纳米颗粒）或使经典全息标签的设计复杂化。在这里，我们提出了一种简单且低成本的技术，用于刻制带有不同类型安全元素的金属微标签，例如具有不同视觉效果和微文本的全息背景以及蚀刻的字母数字元素。这些结构的主要优点是可以将不同类型的安全元件和相对较小的尺寸（数百微米范围）组合在一起，从而使其很难用肉眼识别。我们的结构可以结合到油漆，油墨，纸张中，也可以简单地附着在产品表面上。