Sustainable circularly polarized luminescent inks for cryptography

Abstract

In this study, a reusable ink displaying circularly polarized luminescence was developed by integrating a polymer network with chiral liquid crystals. Specifically, the reversible network fabricated from polymethyl methacrylate was designed to serve as a structural scaffold during the printing process, with this scaffold effectively preserving the intrinsic macroscopic helical structure of the chiral liquid crystals. As a result, a luminescence dissymmetry factor of 3.3 × 10⁻¹ was retained stably under various usage conditions, demonstrating promising potential for applications in multimodal information encryption.