by Bruce Tyson

Created on: January 25, 2012   Last Updated: January 26, 2012

Art forgeries are a legendary product of criminal minds seeking to make a buck through intrigue and clever deception. Thanks to the good folks at Notre Dame University, art dealers and art buyers have a new tool that can protect them from becoming duped into buying into a fraud.

Scientists have devised a way to fire ion beams onto a piece of art to gather evidence that can confirm its authenticity. The new method is superior to traditional efforts to detect forgeries in that the ion beams do not damage the artwork in any way.

Experts have used science to unearth fraud in the art world for decades now, and many experts in fine art have asserted that only human expertise can tell for sure whether art has been forged or if it is genuine. Many of the arguments in favor of human expertise have been challenged by cases where paintings have been certified as authentic, but later scientifically proven to be phony. The new Notre Dame study places confidence in science over a human expert’s ability to evaluate historical elements, style, and contextual clues when evaluating artwork.

The new particle beam, called PIXE for proton-induced x-ray emission, causes electrons to dislodge from targeted artwork. When this happens, the artwork gives off x-rays that have unique characteristics. These x-rays tell scientists the age of the painting, and the nature of the paint used in it. For example, Forbes reports that the technology can tell where elements in the paint such as copper came from.

PIXE isn’t only for paintings either. Scientists have used the new method to date papers written by Galileo so they can be sorted in chronological order.

Notre Dame’s new ion beam techniques threaten to supplant another popular scientific technique called Carbon-14 dating. That method has been used primarily in archaeology, but requires a larger sample of molecular material than PIXE to evaluate authenticity. Unlike PIXE, Carbon-14 dating techniques rely on radioactive emissions that are often rare on a masterpiece. It attempts to measure the rate at which an isotope decays to estimate the age of an object.

The enhanced accuracy of PIXE seems to suggest that professional forgers could soon be either out of work or behind bars. Now that precise information about a painting can be obtained from it without harming it, the entire art world will want to have masterpieces scanned before they are ever put up for sale.

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