Scientists Have Developed a Material So Dark That You Can't See It 238
gbjbaanb writes A British company is developing a new material that's so black it absorbs all but 0.035 percent of the visual light, making it the darkest material ever created. Of course, apart from making album covers, it conducts heat 7 times better than copper and is 10 times stronger than steel. "The nanotube material, named Vantablack, has been grown on sheets of aluminium foil by the Newhaven-based company. While the sheets may be crumpled into miniature hills and valleys, this landscape disappears on areas covered by it. 'You expect to see the hills and all you can see it's like black, like a hole, like there's nothing there. It just looks so strange,' said Ben Jensen, the firm's chief technical officer.
Here's a better article with actual photos (Score:5, Informative)
Daily Mail [dailymail.co.uk]
I was able to sneak into their laboratories (Score:2, Informative)
Very funny. Here are the real pictures: (maybe it's not to late to add this link to the article?)
http://sageofquay.blogspot.nl/
Re:Headline wrong, not invisible. (Score:4, Informative)
Handy in places where reflections are bad though such as telescopes and high end camera internals perhaps.
Unfortunately only very rich ninjas will be able to afford this material. (Pirates will just steal or copy it of course)
Re:I was able to sneak into their laboratories (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Headline wrong, not invisible. (Score:4, Informative)
As long as the manufacturing can scale and it does offer the advantages we assume, I would expect in in £300 cameras with 5 years, maybe even cheaper. Look at Gorilla Glass, once they found a market and could scale, now everyone uses it for smartphones.
Re:Inside of cameras (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't research so forgive my ignorance
It gets this property from its fine surface structure, which is a forest of tubes. Incoming light has to be reflected many times before it gets back out, so a black material is effectively made even less reflective. It's the optical-scale version of the pointed absorbers used in anechoic chambers. [wikipedia.org]
It probably is not going to retain its blackness when exposed to water, dirt, or wear. Superhydrophobic coatings such as Never Wet [rustoleum.com] have the same problem - they work because they're composed of tiny points, so droplets of liquid don't have a surface they can grab. But after some wear, the effect stops working. (See any of the many "NeverWet fails" videos on YouTube.)
This is likely to be great for protected environments, such as inside optical systems. It should be useful for optical sensors in space, too. But it's probably an inherently fragile surface. That limits its uses. (The "stronger than steel" probably refers to the individual carbon nanotubes, not the bulk material.)
This s a problem with a lot of surface chemistry stuff touted as "nanomaterials". They have interesting surface properties, but the surfaces are fragile, because they're some very thin surface layer with an unusual structure. If you protect that structure with some coating, you lose the effect.
Re:galactic hyper-hearse (Score:4, Informative)
That was my thought as well. The more appropriate quote, too, was not regarding the interior of the ship, which was merely black (and lots of it), but the exterior of the ship. Ford's line before the entered the ship - "It's so black - you can hardly even make out its shape. Light just falls into it." - seemed a much better fit for this story.