Nano-media: New nano-photofabric for rapid imprinting of color images and covert data storage

We present the concept of `nano-media' as a novel carrier to imprint and display color images with embedded covert information. The key novelty of the proposed nanoscale technology is (1) the introduction of nano-substrate such as polymer (plastic), paper, glass, metal, or other tissue/fabric and (2) the imprinting processes. Nano-substrate consists of the pixelated nano-structures that are specially designed to display red, green and blue primary colors, and infrared radiation, and can be pre-fabricated on any substrate. The imprinting process activates the pixels according to the desired image that is transferred onto nano-substrate. The effective optical intensity of the pixelated nano-structures is tuned by an intensity control layer (ICL), which is patterned according to the desired color image and covert information. Using this technology, any given full-color image and/or covert data can be embedded on a prefabricated nano-substrate. This new technology makes possible to practically and efficiently use the nano-structures as a visual information display (next generation of holography) and as an high density and long term optical storage medium. In this paper, the concept, the design of the nano-media and the proof-of-concept experimental work are presented. We successfully produced full-color images with 1,270 pixels per inch (PPI) resolution using various ICLs on the fabricated nano-substrate. We also embedded covert information into the nano-media by patterning the intensity of infrared sub-pixels and successfully read the information using an infrared camera device. The texts, QR codes and photos were all tested as the covert information which was retrieved without any loss. The color images and stored data are of very high quality that can be controlled by the imprinting processes.