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Khachatur Manukyan and his team employed cutting-edge spectroscopic and imaging instruments to get a closer look than ever at the inks, paper, and fibers that made Benjamin Franklin’s bills distinctive and hard to replicate. Credit: Barbara Johnston / University of Notre Dame One of the most distinctive features they found was in Franklin’s pigments. Manukyan and his team determined the chemical elements used for each item in Notre Dame’s collection of Colonial notes. The counterfeits, they found, have distinctive high quantities of calcium and phosphorus, but these elements are found only in traces in the genuine bills.