Unlocking the decoding of unknown magnetic nanobarcode signatures

Mohammad Reza Zamani Kouhpanji; Bethanie J H Stadler

doi:10.1039/d0na00924e

Unlocking the decoding of unknown magnetic nanobarcode signatures

Nanoscale Adv. 2020 Dec 9;3(2):584-592. doi: 10.1039/d0na00924e. eCollection 2021 Jan 26.

Authors

Mohammad Reza Zamani Kouhpanji^{1

2}, Bethanie J H Stadler^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota Twin Cities Minneapolis MN 55455 USA.
² Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Minnesota Twin Cities Minneapolis MN 55455 USA.
³ Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota Twin Cities Minneapolis MN 55455 USA stadler@umn.edu +1 612 626 1628.

Abstract

Magnetic nanowires (MNWs) rank among the most promising multifunctional magnetic nanomaterials for nanobarcoding applications owing to their safety, nontoxicity, and remote decoding using a single magnetic excitation source. Until recently, coercivity and saturation magnetization have been proposed as encoding parameters. Herein, backward remanence magnetization (BRM) is used to decode unknown remanence spectra of MNWs-based nanobarcodes. A simple and fast expectation algorithm is proposed to decode the unknown remanence spectra with a success rate of 86% even though the MNWs have similar coercivities, which cannot be accomplished by other decoding schemes. Our experimental approach and analytical analysis open a promising direction towards reliably decoding magnetic nanobarcodes to expand their capabilities for security and labeling applications.