What happened on 8th November 2016? No, it’s not about Donald Trump becoming the president of the USA. This news overshadowed all global news. Yes! Overnight demonetization was announced on this day.
It created chaos in the country and affected the lives of all. By now we know the reason which led our Prime Minister to take such a bold call. Banning old notes and printing new, affects the economy and no country wants to repeat this every few years.
To overcome the problem of counterfeiting, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research came with a security ink that can prevent the fake printing of passports and the counterfeiting of currency notes. Not only that, National Physical Laboratory has developed a bi-luminescent security ink which glows in red and green colours when illuminated by two different excitation sources at 254 nanometres (nm) and 365 nm, respectively. The development of the ink is based on the concept of fluorescence and phosphorescence phenomena. Both these emit spontaneous emissions of electromagnetic radiation. The glow of fluorescence stops right after switching off the source of excitatory radiation, but phosphorescence afterglow continues for a duration ranging from fractions of a second to hours.
The developed ink has the features of changing the colour of pigment after the notes are printed. The ink shows white colour in ambient light. It turns into a red colour when it is exposed to UV light and when the UV source is switched off it turns into a green colour.
The ink, exhibited almost the same viscosity when stored for months which confirms that it has a shelf life for a longer duration. The alternate on and off of excitation source, and the dual colour can be easily distinguished by the naked eye under ambient conditions, which is difficult to counterfeit but easy to detect, and that could be helpful to stop the counterfeiting problem of currency notes and important documents. Thanks to this new scientific development, we will never have to go through the pain of demonetization ever again.
Edward Teller rightly said, “The science of today is the technology of tomorrow.”
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