Engineers Create the Blackest Material Yet (phys.org)

schwit1 writes: Researchers have created the least reflective material ever made, using as inspiration the scales on the all-white cyphochilus beetle. The result was an extremely tiny nanoparticle rod resting on an equally tiny nanoparticle sphere (30 nm diameter) which was able to absorb approximately 98 to 99 percent of the light in the spectrum between 400 and 1,400nm, which meant it was able to absorb approximately 26 percent more light than any other known material — and it does so from all angles and polarizations.

Comments

How black?

[justthinkit]

Blackity Black Black?

Vantablack anyone?

[Slyswede]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Just sayin...

Re:Vantablack anyone?

[tlhIngan]

Black is an interesting color.

Black paint absorbs 90-95% of light, the military has Z306 that absorbs 96% of light (and is used for paint as well as coatings for telescopes). NASA has developed materials that absorb 99.95% of light, and Vantablack is 99.965%. The ultimate black is of course, a black hole which absorbs all light (barring quantum phenomena that results in hawking radiation).

The human eye cannot comprehend sucn black - since our black objects all reflect significant amounts of light back. Looking at Vantablack or this, your mind actually sees a hole and doesn't register that there's something there.

The American Chemical Society better explains this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Vantablack anyone?

[del_diablo]

Here is the simplest explanation: Once a object no longer reflects light properly, you can no longer tell what shape it has. You can only see its outline.
If you rotate it, you have trouble seeing if it was rotated if the shape is uniform(i.e sphere)
Muh comprehension is a shitty reason to use, because we need to see reflected light to see what shape a object has, and from there we can deduct whatever.

Re:Vantablack anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

The American Chemical Society better explains this...

I'm not sure anything like that video- obviously aimed at ADHD 12-year-olds with its chop-and-changing animated-slideshow pointlessness and inanely intrusive library music- could be described as "better".

I think del_diablo explained it better without any of that crap. (If you want the only part of the video that's worth seeing, it's here, and that could be shown just as well as static images).

Practical applications

[beowulfcluster]

What are the practical applications for a breakthrough like this? Other than for a government that wants to do some redacting of their documents.

Re:Practical applications

[stevelinton]

Coating the inside of high end telescopes and related equipment to reduce stray reflections.

Re:Practical applications

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just telescopes, but just about any precision optical instrument that has to deal with low light signals and stray light issues.

For one example, there are spectrometers that look at scattered from a laser beam, and filter out the wavelength of light associated with the laser itself. For high precision work, filters can't filter out a narrow enough part of the spectrum, so some will break the light up with a diffraction grating and use a physical object to block the part of the spectrum associated with the laser line. But usually there is too much reflected light from this bouncing around, so the result is much more complicated schemes using multiple diffraction gratings to split up the light and recombine it so it can be spatially filtered to remove stray light and then spread out again for measurement. With a dark enough coating on the object blocking part of the spectra and insides of the spectrometer, a simple, common single grating spectrometer could be used.

Blackest and Most Reflective

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Possibly could be used as part of stealthy tech for drone and airplane design.

2. Immediately draws all LAPD officers within a 10-block radius.

Re:Yo' mama's

[Anonymous Coward]

And your extremely tiny nanoparticle rod resting on equally tiny nanoparticle spheres doesn't impress her.

Re: Solar Thermal Applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, at least not for home water or space heating. There the efficiency is energy gained from the Sun less energy lost to reradiation. The best materials for that job are 'selective', meaning that they are very black in the frequencies the Sun radiates the most and very shiny (low emissivity) in the infrared frequencies that a solar panel would reradiate the most.

Re:Still not as black as..........

[willworkforbeer]

Still not as black as my ex-wife's heart.

Yours had a heart? Show off.

New York Fashion

[willworkforbeer]

Scoffs at your somewhat blackish material, awaits actual wearable black hole.

How is the energy it absorbs dissipated?

[RNLockwood]

The particles absorb photons over a wide band, violet through 'thermal'. Presumably the energy is dissipated as though from a black body unless it is removed by conduction. For example when illuminated by visible light they would radiate mostly in the infrared (unless the absorbed energy is removed by conduction) and would be seen to glow in infrared.

If they could be tweaked to absorb better at a wavelength that is best transmitted by human tissue and attached to an antibody that attaches to cancer cells they might be used as antennae to heat and destroy the cells.

Not the blackest

[jandjmh]

Are the creators of this material even aware of Vantablack? Their new material seems far inferior ...

Re:Solar Thermal Applications?

[KGIII]

I clicked the link, kind of excited, thinking that, "Oh, I wonder how dark it is?" Then I realized I'm a moron. It's not like the pixels on my screen have a new setting saying, "This is the new black!"