VantaBlack, pssht, only 99.96%, new blackest black absorbs 99.995%

[masraum]

Wow, there's a new leader of the blackest black, race.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/theres-new-blackest-black-town-180973175/

Inside the hallowed halls of the New York Stock Exchange is brilliant yellow diamond that once sparkled like the twinkling rays of the sun. But to gaze upon it now is to stare into nothingness, the diamond’s glistening facets transformed into a dark, flat void. As part of a collaboration between MIT researchers and the artist Diemut Strebe, this precious gem has been covered with a new substance so black that it swallows 99.995 percent of any incoming light, making it the blackest material on Earth.

Obscuring the beauty of a $2 million diamond might seem like a strange thing to do, but the blackest of all blacks is itself a coveted prize. The craze began with Vantablack, an ultra-black coating developed by Surrey Nanosystems that absorbs 99.96 percent of light. In 2016, the artist Anish Kapoor acquired the exclusive rights to use Vantablack in an artistic capacity, which rankled other artists—most notably Stuart Semple, who created the world’s “pinkest pink” and “most glittery glitter,” and made them accessible to all artists except Kapoor. Extending the squabble, Kapoor posted an Instagram photo of his raised middle finger, coated in Semple’s pink pigment.

Semple subsequently created his own super-dark acrylic paint, and in 2017, the Massachusetts-based NanoLab released its own light-obliterating black coating called Singularity Black. Both substances were available for artists to purchase and use, though neither were as dark as Vantablack. The MIT black, however, is the darkest of them all, “10 times blacker than anything that has previously been reported,” according to the university.

Ironically, the new black on the block came about by accident. Brian Wardle, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, and Kehang Cui, a former MIT postdoctoral student who is now a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, made the discovery while tinkering with ways to grow carbon nanotubes (CNTs) on electrically conducting materials like aluminum, according to CNN’s Kendall Trammell. CNTs are tiny carbon cylinders that trap and absorb light—they were used in the manufacture of both Vantablack and Singularity Black.

“With this sort of class of materials, it's actually natural processes that create them,” Wardle explains in an interview with Carol Off of the CBC. “We grow them from a catalyst nanoparticle seed, super saturated with gaseous carbon, and then that starts to extrude a carbon hollow tube very quickly. And when you get lots of catalyst particles working next to each other, and you get 50 billion per square centimetre, you can grow grass or, if you get the recipe right, you can grow a forest of these nanotubes.”

Wardle and Cui suspected that growing CNTs on aluminum would enhance the material’s thermal and electrical properties, and they turned out to be right. But the researchers did not anticipate just how dark the resulting substance would be. They found that it was gulping up light from every angle, to an even greater degree than Vantablack. And that’s when they turned to Strebe, an artist-in-residence at the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology.

Strebe wanted to showcase the new ultra-black on a diamond because like CNTs, diamonds are made from carbon, yet they are highly reflective. “The unification of extreme opposites in one object and the particular aesthetic features of the CNTs caught my imagination for this art project,” Strebe explains.

The choice of venue for the new exhibition, which is titled “The Redemption of Vanity,” was also deliberate. “[T]here's a concept called ‘over painting’ where you maybe devalue something valuable,” Wardle tells Off. “But when you do that, perhaps actually you increase its value. So it's a bit of a challenge to the art community and that was part of the reason why we debuted the art piece at the New York Stock Exchange.”

It’s not just the art world that is interested in materials of nearly unfathomable blackness. According to MIT, the famed astrophysicist John Mather is already looking into the possibility of using the new black as the basis for a huge “star shade,” which would shield space telescopes from stray light. It was NASA, in fact, that commissioned Singularity Black from NanoLabs to reduce the glare on instruments used to observe distant stars.

Wardle and Cui have published details about discovery in the journal ACS-Applied Materials and Interfaces. But they think it’s only a matter of time before a new contender for the title of blackest black comes along.

“I think the blackest black is a constantly moving target,” Wardle says. “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.”

And I'm thinking "that would be great to coat the inside of telescope tubes!!" I guess I should have read the article before I thought I was clever talking about flocking telescope tubes.

[sc_rufctr]

We keep pushing forward! Great stuff...

[95avblm3]

I got to see the Vantablack X6 at the Frankfurt Auto Show yesterday. Kinda cool, I suppose. I didn't hang around for the "show" as I wanted to see other cars.

As a side-note, this year's show stood in stark contrast to the last show in 2017. Electric cars dominated, which on one hand is cool but an unintended consequence is that the show was not as large with several manufacturers either not there or there with notably smaller displays. Disappointing in a sense but that is a topic for another thread. Sorry for hijacking.

Here's a pic:

[Deschodt]

yeah but can you paint your face with it ? Asking for a Canadian friend....

[gordner]

^^^hahahahaha^^^

[masraum]

Originally Posted by Deschodt

yeah but can you paint your face with it ? Asking for a Canadian friend....

Apparently, the answer is yes! ;^)

If you can coat a metal face....

[Oracle]

Originally Posted by Deschodt

yeah but can you paint your face with it ? Asking for a Canadian friend....

Apparently you can.. And still have the face to talk about how to be inclusive, accept diverstity, etc.. that politicians love to say..

[reachme]

Spinal Tap Black Album "None More Black"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds7FRivVMgA

[Brando]

I have heard the by-product of absorbing 99.995% of all light directed at an object coated with that, is the amount of heat it retains.

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by Brando

I have heard the by-product of absorbing 99.995% of all light directed at an object coated with that, is the amount of heat it retains.

Yea, any black car is hot, that car would be impossible to be in, outside in the full sun.

At a recent outdoor even I was dumbfounded to see the majority of people wearing black shirts and many dressed all in black. It was a hot day, full sun.

[911boost]

Did I just see a black cat walk by?

https://youtu.be/z_KmNZNT5xw

Swore this was already discussed.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by Brando

I have heard the by-product of absorbing 99.995% of all light directed at an object coated with that, is the amount of heat it retains.

What the vantablack folks say

The CNT array is patterned and spaced to allow photons to enter. Most of the light, or radiation arriving at the surface enters the space between the CNTs, and is repeatedly reflected between tubes until it is absorbed and converted to heat. This heat (largely undetectable in most applications) is conducted to the substrate and dissipated. The Vantablack array is very largly free-space; the volume of CNTs only makes up about 0.05% of the coating. Consequently, only a miniscule proportion of the incident radiation is able to hit the tip of a CNT, explaining why such a small amount is reflected back to the observer.

CNTs are hollow structures with one-or-more walls formed from atom-thick sheets of carbon. Each nanotube is around one fiftieth of one millionth (!) of a metre in diameter, making it an appropriately-sized building-block for engineering structures that exhibit low-reflectivity and high-emissivity across a wide-range of frequencies. In addition to incredible light absorption, the CNT array also has many other highly attractive properties:

The high proportion of free-space within Vantablack (>99%) makes it extremely light. The height of a Vantablack coating is typically around 20 to 30 microns. One square metre of coating weighs around 2.5g (for a typical coating - growth parameters are varied to suit the application).
The CNTs have an exceptionally high modulus of elasticity and will flex and bend, making them very robust in environments subject to extreme shock and vibration.
The strength of the CNTs' bond to the substrate is high, making it difficult to remove the forest through thermal cycling, shock or vibration, even though the coating's characteristic's can be compromised through direct abrasion.
Outgassing is virtually zero.
The structures are incredibly tolerant to thermal cycling as a result of the intrinsic properties of the CNT building blocks, and their ability to adhere to a substrate.

This is an old carbon nanotube black coating from 8 years ago developed by NASA

https://phys.org/news/2011-11-super-black-material-absorbs-multiple-wavelength.html

This close-up view (only about 0.03 inches wide) shows the internal structure of a carbon-nanotube coating that absorbs about 99 percent of the ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and far-infrared light that strikes it. A section of the coating, which was grown on smooth silicon, was purposely removed to show the tubes' vertical alignment. (Credit: Stephanie Getty, NASA Goddard)

This high-magnification image, taken with an electron microscope, shows an even closer view of the hollow carbon nanotubes. A coating made of this material is seen as black by the human eye and sensitive detectors because the tiny gaps between the tubes collect and trap light, preventing reflection. (Credit: Stephanie Getty, NASA Goddard)

(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA engineers have produced a material that absorbs on average more than 99 percent of the ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and far-infrared light that hits it -- a development that promises to open new frontiers in space technology.

The team of engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., reported their findings recently at the SPIE Optics and Photonics conference, the largest interdisciplinary technical meeting in this discipline. The team has since reconfirmed the material's absorption capabilities in additional testing, said John Hagopian, who is leading the effort involving 10 Goddard technologists.

"The reflectance tests showed that our team had extended by 50 times the range of the material’s absorption capabilities. Though other researchers are reporting near-perfect absorption levels mainly in the ultraviolet and visible, our material is darn near perfect across multiple wavelength bands, from the ultraviolet to the far infrared," Hagopian said. "No one else has achieved this milestone yet."

The nanotech-based coating is a thin layer of multi-walled carbon nanotubes, tiny hollow tubes made of pure carbon about 10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair. They are positioned vertically on various substrate materials much like a shag rug. The team has grown the nanotubes on silicon, silicon nitride, titanium, and stainless steel, materials commonly used in space-based scientific instruments. (To grow carbon nanotubes, Goddard technologist Stephanie Getty applies a catalyst layer of iron to an underlayer on silicon, titanium, and other materials. She then heats the material in an oven to about 1,382 degrees Fahrenheit. While heating, the material is bathed in carbon-containing feedstock gas.)

[911boost]

That is pretty damn cool.

[Bill Douglas]

A waste of a perfectly good diamond. Painting a brick would have achieved the same results.

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by Bill Douglas

A waste of a perfectly good diamond. Painting a brick would have achieved the same results.

The coating will be removed easily. The diamond is undamaged.

[Bill Douglas]

Good point. Painting a diamond, everyone notices. Painting a brick, no one cares.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by Bill Douglas

Good point. Painting a diamond, everyone notices. Painting a brick, no one cares.

Exactly. it might have had more impact if they had only painted half of the diamond. Or maybe a hot, naked chick.

[RWebb]

.. which reminds me of the '70s slogan "Black is Bootyful!"

[Por_sha911]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

The coating will be removed easily. The diamond is undamaged.

I had heard that once you go black...

[wildthing]

Can I get a full body suit for Halloween?