NovaVera Crystallography: Closing the Gap in Taggant Performance

At the recent High Security Printing™ EMEA conference, in Rabat, Morocco, the technology and innovation session highlighted notable advances in the field of authentication. These included a new class of inorganic taggants for digital and conventional printing processes, presented by Josh Collins of NovaVera.

The NovaVera presentation underlined a persistent gap between legacy security technologies and evolving threat capabilities. Traditional taggants, both organic and inorganic, have served the market for decades, yet each has inherent limitations. Organic solutions degrade over time, while larger inorganic materials often lack the precision and optical density required for modern applications.

NovaVera positions its Intelligent Material® platform (originally developed at Intelligent Material Solutions) as an alternative approach in this landscape. Built on advanced nano-crystal engineering, it introduces a new kind of sub-micron inorganic taggants designed for high-security authentication, traceability, and lifecycle durability.

Intelligent Material in various shapes and sizes (© NovaVera).

Precision engineering

The platform is grounded in crystallographic principles—the science of how atoms are arranged in solids—but applies them at the nanoscale to engineer highly uniform materials. Developed in collaboration with Chris Murray, a leading nanochemist cited in the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the approach uses precise control of crystal structure to produce narrow, tuneable optical signatures.

These engineered nanocrystals exhibit a high degree of uniformity, enabling consistent and repeatable optical behaviour. This contrasts with many conventional inorganic taggants, which can show broader and less predictable spectral responses due to variation in particle size and structure.

As a result, the materials can be detected at very low concentrations, allowing effective authentication with minimal material loading. At the same time, their inorganic composition provides inherent stability, including resistance to heat and environmental degradation, supporting performance across the product lifecycle.

Seamless integration

A major barrier to adopting advanced security features is disruption to existing production processes. NovaVera’s approach directly addresses this constraint.

The sub-micron scale of the taggants enables integration across a wide range of substrates, including paper, plastics, metals, and textiles. Crucially, it also supports use in both conventional and digital printing processes, including high-speed inkjet.

This is a notable point of differentiation. Larger inorganic particles can obstruct inkjet nozzles or cause mechanical wear, particularly where particles are hard or irregular in shape. By contrast, smaller, more uniform particles reduce these risks, enabling incorporation without significant disruption to established workflows such as offset, gravure, or digital printing.

Data-driven authentication

Beyond simple verification, the platform supports a broader data-driven approach to product security. A proprietary two-step detection process – signal excitation followed by algorithmic decoding – enables accurate identification of embedded materials.

This supports three key functions:

• Authentication – rapid yes/no verification, with the ability to detect tampering through signal variation.
• Quantification – measurement of embedded components at parts-per-million to parts-per-trillion levels.
• Traceability and serialisation – creation of unique optical fingerprints at batch or individual item level, linking products to origin, production data, or supply chain pathways.

In this sense, the taggant moves beyond a passive marker to become a machine-readable data carrier embedded within the product.

The combination of advanced material engineering and scalable detection reflects a wider shift in authentication strategy. Security features are moving toward embedded, machine-readable, data-rich solutions that operate across the full product lifecycle.