Halide Perovskites as Emerging Anti-Counterfeiting Materials Contribute to Smart Flow of Goods

The counterfeiting of goods is a fast-growing issue worldwide, being a risk to human health, financial safety, and national security. Customized anti-counterfeiting patterning technologies enable unclonable tags on products, which ensure the reliable and convenient flow of goods such as daily foods, prescription medicines, and value-added components. In this chapter, we start with the introduction of recent advances of anti-counterfeiting technologies that generate unique physical tags on products for encryption and information storage. Various halide perovskite-based materials and their fabrication techniques for unreplicable luminescent patterns are then discussed, with a particular focus on the intelligent encoding principles that correlate with the chromism and other special optical readout of materials. The multilevel anti-counterfeiting functions that allow high-throughput authentication of products within a single tag are also exemplified, through which the increasing security demands can be fulfilled. We finally discuss the current issues encountered by perovskite anti-counterfeiting technologies and outline their future directions toward smarter and safer flow of goods.