Patent ID: 7265904

Claim:
An optical security element having a substrate layer, wherein a first microstructure for producing a first optically perceptible effect is shaped region-wise into the substrate layer in a surface region of the substrate layer, wherein the first microstructure is a diffraction structure, diffraction structure for producing a hologram or a matt structure, that the surface region is divided into microscopically fine pattern regions and a background region and the first microstructure is shaped in the pattern regions but not in the background region, that the microscopically fine pattern regions in the surface region are arranged in the form of a moire pattern into which a concealed item of information which can be evaluated by means of an associated verification element is encoded as a security feature, wherein the moire pattern has at least one line grating, with a plurality of lines at a line spacing in the range of 40 to 200 μm and the line grating is phase-displaced in region-wise manner to produce the concealed information, and that the microscopically fine pattern regions are further substructured in accordance with a substructuring function which describes a microscopic substructuring, which serves as a further security feature, of the moire pattern and which encodes additional items of information in the surface region.