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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday September 14 2019, @12:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the black-is-the-new-black dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Now with even greater light-absorbing ability!

Engineers develop 'blackest black' material to date

With apologies to "Spinal Tap," it appears that black can, indeed, get more black.

MIT engineers report today that they have cooked up a material that is 10 times blacker than anything that has previously been reported. The material is made from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, or CNTs—microscopic filaments of carbon, like a fuzzy forest of tiny trees, that the team grew on a surface of chlorine-etched aluminum foil. The foil captures more than 99.96 percent of any incoming light, making it the blackest material on record.

The researchers have published their findings today in the journal ACS-Applied Materials and Interfaces. They are also showcasing the cloak-like material as part of a new exhibit today at the New York Stock Exchange, titled "The Redemption of Vanity."

The artwork, a collaboration between Brian Wardle, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, and his group, and MIT artist-in-residence Diemut Strebe, features a 16.78-carat natural yellow diamond, estimated to be worth $2 million, which the team coated with the new, ultrablack CNT material. The effect is arresting: The gem, normally brilliantly faceted, appears as a flat, black void.

Wardle says the CNT material, aside from making an artistic statement, may also be of practical use, for instance in optical blinders that reduce unwanted glare, to help space telescopes spot orbiting exoplanets.

"There are optical and space science applications for very black materials, and of course, artists have been interested in black, going back well before the Renaissance," Wardle says. "Our material is 10 times blacker than anything that's ever been reported, but I think the blackest black is a constantly moving target. Someone will find a blacker material, and eventually we'll understand all the underlying mechanisms, and will be able to properly engineer the ultimate black."

Wardle's co-author on the paper is former MIT postdoc Kehang Cui, now a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @01:12PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @01:12PM (#894050)

    https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/09/01/076214 [soylentnews.org]

    > “You vantablack car? Ve haff precisely vhat you need.”

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @01:21PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @01:21PM (#894052)

      The blackest material is a crystalline structure that separates and reflects various wavelengths of EM / light back onto itself out of phase to convert light into magnetism...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @01:37PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @01:37PM (#894057)

      Very interesting that these vantablack materials keep on getting appropriated by artists right out of the gate.

      They should use vantablack 3.0 on a space telescope or something. A $2 million space telescope.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @02:22PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @02:22PM (#894066)

        The most expensive telescopes in orbit look not into space, but here into Earth. Gotta know who is doing what.

      • (Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday September 15 2019, @06:30PM

        by driverless (4770) on Sunday September 15 2019, @06:30PM (#894403)

        Neat! Now I can finally live my dream of painting my house blacker-than-black, and then paint the windowframes black to liven things up.

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @02:29PM (10 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @02:29PM (#894067)

    Make the material less expensive and one can use fabrics covered with the black material to avoid surveillance cameras. Would work beautifully if many people agreed to avoid cameras.

    Giving the finger to cameras would tire your finger down and you would lose interest in giving them the finger any more. Also looks inappropriate in public.

    But people are so busy trying to make ends meet that they have no time to defend themselves against privacy violations. (((They))) did this on purpose to kill dissent.

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by janrinok on Saturday September 14 2019, @02:58PM (2 children)

      by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 14 2019, @02:58PM (#894071) Journal

      ... until you get knocked down crossing the road because the driver didn't see you.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 15 2019, @04:09AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 15 2019, @04:09AM (#894245)

        I'm the one driving the car.

        • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday September 15 2019, @04:46AM

          by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 15 2019, @04:46AM (#894252) Journal

          In which case your car will show up perfectly well on their cameras. In many countries, if you are not the one driving a car that is registered to you, you have to be in a position to identify who was driving your vehicle at a specific time. So their is a capability for Big Brother to know where you are, where your vehicle is, and who is driving it upon production of the relevant warrant or police powers granting them such a right.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @03:33PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @03:33PM (#894078)

      Dark colors make it easier to avoid surveillance cameras? That makes it really easy for niggers to commit crimes. Basically, you're proposing to look like a nigger to the surveillance camera.

      • (Score: 1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 14 2019, @10:45PM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 14 2019, @10:45PM (#894189) Journal

        Yeah, parent is a troll - BUT!! Facial recognition really is bad at reading darker skinned people. Works great on white males, not so great on anyone who is not adult white and male. Maybe the troll's ideas are worth exploring?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @04:02PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @04:02PM (#894094)

      I could see something like this being useful for something like a solar array. The kind with thousands of mirrors and one collecting tower.

      • (Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday September 14 2019, @09:17PM (3 children)

        by anubi (2828) on Saturday September 14 2019, @09:17PM (#894159) Journal

        Agreed...looks like the thermal emissivity of this stuff is phenomenal.

        But it's fragile and easily soiled.

        Think it stands up to solar wind?

        It may be useful for thermal Management in spacecraft, both as a heat source and heat sink radiating to deep space.

        --
        "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
        • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 14 2019, @10:50PM (2 children)

          by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 14 2019, @10:50PM (#894190) Journal

          Related thinking:

          It has been explained by several people that "stealth" won't work in space. A space craft will radiate energy, and the radiation is pretty easy to spot when the background is cold and dark. Maybe this stuff can be used to make stealthy spacecraft? Or, if not this stuff specifically, then some newer material based on the same idea?

          • (Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday September 14 2019, @11:04PM

            by anubi (2828) on Saturday September 14 2019, @11:04PM (#894191) Journal

            Nah, not stealth, you nailed the why exactly.

            I was thinking more down the line of HVAC, sans air, for spacecraft.

            --
            "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
          • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday September 15 2019, @08:56AM

            by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday September 15 2019, @08:56AM (#894280) Journal

            Maybe this stuff can be used to make stealthy spacecraft?

            No. Black materials are the absolute best emitters of thermal radiation.

            Not that a white spacecraft would emit less radiation; it just would heat up more before emitting the same amount of radiation.

            --
            The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by janrinok on Saturday September 14 2019, @02:57PM (2 children)

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 14 2019, @02:57PM (#894070) Journal

    I was skeptical that this was anything new when I first read it. After all, as others have pointed out, vantablack has been around for a while. But I'm not so sure however, it all depends on how you interpret what is being said.

    Vantblack "absorb[s] up to 99.96% of visible light (at 663 nm if the light is perpendicular to the material)." The new CNT material abosrbs "more than 99.96 percent of any incoming light". From the abstract [acs.org] I read "CNT–metal hierarchical architectures demonstrate omnidirectional blackbody photoabsorption with the reflectance of 1 × 10–5 over the range from ultraviolet to terahertz region, which is 1 order of magnitude lower than that of any previously reported broadband absorber material." So they are claiming that it is 10 times 'blacker' than Vantablack and a much improved angle of cover.

    As I'm sure someone once said - "this I have got to see!" - but perhaps that is the point, you can't see it...

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Saturday September 14 2019, @03:55PM (3 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday September 14 2019, @03:55PM (#894090) Journal

    Nice try, engineers, but the blackest color is still fuligin [technovelgy.com].

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday September 14 2019, @06:16PM (1 child)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday September 14 2019, @06:16PM (#894115) Journal

      From your link:

      the hue fuligin, which is darker than black, admirably erases all folds, bunchings and gatherings so far as the eye is concerned, showing only a featureless dark.

      From the article:

      In essence, if the material contained bumps or ridges, or features of any kind, no matter what angle it was viewed from, these features would be invisible, obscured in a void of black.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @09:21PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @09:21PM (#894161)

      Fuligin. Clever.

      When I am fulligin, I can't see it either, neither can I stand or pee straight.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @05:43PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @05:43PM (#894111)

    One of the problems with Vantablack was that it was not durable at all and was very prone to scratching. The scratches and flaking thus creating imperfections that subsequently reflects light. Also, if you tried to layer a material over top of it to make it more resistant to damage, it would reflect light again. So that's all fine and dandy that they can get these super blacks but if they're more fragile than Apple's new credit card then they're limited in usefulness.

    • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday September 14 2019, @09:15PM (1 child)

      by Thexalon (636) on Saturday September 14 2019, @09:15PM (#894158)

      The other imperfection of Vantablack was that nobody could use it for artistic purposes except Anish Kapoor [gizmodo.com].

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @09:31PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @09:31PM (#894166)

        Well, after reading your link, I found it refreshing to see other creative artists to be just as frustrated with all this rights crap as I am.

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