Darkest man-made material

[Royston]

The darkest material, made from carbon nanotubes has been made in a US lab...according to researchers it's 'the closest thing yet to the ideal black material, which absorbs light perfectly at all angles and over all wavelengths.'

 

Please see the BBC article below...

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7190107.stm

 

From the article...

An ideal black object absorbs all the colours of light and reflects none of them. In theory, it should be possible to make something that approaches the "perfect absorber."

 

A team led by Dr Pulickel Ajayan, who is presently at Rice University in Houston, Texas, built an array of vertically aligned, low-density carbon nanotubes. Dr Shawn Lin measured the optical properties. The roughness of the material's surface was tuned to minimise its optical reflectance.

 

Experiments showed that this "forest" of carbon nanotubes was very good at absorbing light, and very poor at reflecting it. Reporting their findings in the journal Nano Letters, Dr Ajayan, Dr Lin and colleagues say the reflectance of the material is three times lower than previously achieved. This makes it the "darkest man-made material ever."

[Gilded]

Hmm interesting. I think it'll be a while until angsty teenagers can paint their rooms with carbon nanotubes though. :|

[thedarkshade]

I thought we were supposed to get rid of "dark" adjective with the advance of science!

 

Interesting though... Cheers

[Mag]

Yes, very interesting.

I'd like to see them put a bunch together, so we can see it,.

[chichickon]

just think what it would be like to have a door made out of that stuff.

[antimatter]

Do all of the carbon allotrope's have the same effect?

Or is it just nanotubes?

 

I thought we were supposed to get rid of "dark" adjective with the advance of science!

 

What other word is there...?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Do all of the carbon allotrope's have the same effect?

Or is it just nanotubes?

Well, things like graphite aren't as dark as this particular material, so I presume not all allotropes do it.

[antimatter]

Well, things like graphite aren't as dark as this particular material, so I presume not all allotropes do it.

 

Right, diamonds too.

 

But what about buckyballs?

[Klaynos]

antimatter, I'd suggest you have a quick read about photonic crystals...

[swansont]

The trick is having a lot of ways for light to get into the material and then bounce around and be absorbed. A stack of razor blades makes an excellent beam-dump for this very reason — the shallow angle means that scattering is forward, and there is little surface area presented to the beam.

 

Of course, the perfect absorber is also a perfect radiator, so this isn't "black" in the IR, if it's near room temperature.