Can it be true? That I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of PUREST ... BLACK? British boffins have constructed a light-absorbing nano-material that could improve the accuracy and sensitivity of imaging and optics systems. Researchers at Surrey NanoSystems say that their Vantablack material, built from carbon nanotubes, is capable of absorbing as much as 99.96 per cent of incident radiation to create a …
"It's the weird color-scheme that freaks me. Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls, which are labeled in black on a black background, a small black light lights up in black to let you know you've done it!" -Zaphod/Mark Wing-Davey (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
"You know space, right. It's defining colour is, well, black. And this new Vantablack, right, how it's, well, black, right?" -- Holly
"Is it 'cause I's black?" -- Vantablack.
And just for the fanboyism engendered by the title: "Percy Percy Percy Percy Percy Percy!"
"That," he said, "that... is really bad for the eyes."
It was a ship of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing about it.
"It's so... black!" said Ford Prefect. "You can hardly make out its shape... light just seems to fall into it!"
The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it.
"Your eyes just slide off it..." said Ford in wonder.
> The space craft that belonged to Hotblack Desiato I believe,
Correct. While he took a year dead (for tax reasons).
You might need to consider doing the same should you book Disaster Area for the local church fête: governments are likely to be unhappy with the wholesale breach of strategic arms limitation treats.
"Looks like the perfect material for painting those fake tunnels on cliff faces! (Beep-beep)"
That only works if the paint also contains Quantathru (TM), designed by scientists at Acme company to permit quantum tunnelling.
This was almost a wonder-material, but it was later discovered that it only allowed objects of a certain size and shape (such as land-based birds) to tunnel, and not others (e.g. various canine-derived species).
As a result, a lawsuit was later filed by an Arizona-based resident which also included complaints about other Acme-branded products.
'This [Vantablack] is not a groundbreaking thing," sniffed professor George Stylios at the school of textiles and design at Heriot-Watt university to the Graun. "It's a progression of a group of scientists, of companies....
What an asinine thing for someone to say. Of course it's a progression. Everything is a progression. It's not like carbon nanotubes were just falling out of the sky and a random ape descendent, half sloshed on fermented beverages picked them up. Then, taken with their exceptional blackness, invented an alphabet and language so the acrylic packaging for the product would be attractive and informative to the potential buyers from an aerospace sector that suddenly appeared behind him, waving fistfuls of standardized trade tokens, then popped on over to his personal computer to draft a press release.
What an ass.
then there's http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/super-black-material.html from 2011.
looks like a patent is going to be tough . . . the multi-walled nanotube absorbers have been around for a while.
i'd also like to see if their absorption spectra go from UV to far-infrared like the boys from Goddard system does.
Haven't most PDs switched to LIDAR by this point? Which would make this useless since they tend to aim for your plate (which by law MUST be visible AND reflective) and only need a short burst, usually around a blind curve or over a hilltop, to get a speed reading?
Radar - most likely no. The cops have mostly switched to IR laser guns and this should be perfect for them. Ditto for any laser rangefinder - there will be nothing to return back, so this clearly has some very obvious applications.
I think not.
as a stripling i recall fucking around with phase conjugate mirrors - used in loads of laser applications and 99.96% is no great shakes. (think high energy - if you have 0.04% of the output of a 600W co2 laser heating up a few sq mm of the layer of a mirror a few microns thick... thats a 2 bucket fire right there!)
reflection being 1/absorption we can say that if 0.04% gets bounced. that's probably enough to be detected pretty easily.
The beam could care less about the color/material your car is painted/made of. As long as the windows are made of safety glass you'll bounce more than enough signal back for an accurate speed reading. Same with your headlamps. You're pushing at least two fairly efficient reflectors in front of you everywhere you go (in your car).
In movies and various 'tales of urban wisdom' you'll hear people say 'cops aim for the chrome bumper on your car so they can get a better reading'. Obviously, few cars have chrome bumpers these days, but the shiny bumper was never the point. They aim for the bumper because that gives the beam the longest exposure with the vehicle. To the best of my knowledge, 'single reading' systems haven't been used by police since the 1960's. Since that time they average your speed which is, generally, better for you assuming you aren't accelerating at a rate that's going to blow past the limit in a blink anyway :)
You need to get some radar absorbing ablative from most any small air to ground missile produced since the early '70's. About US $350 for two litres. Won't do a damned bit of good against laser guns though. Maybe this will. Hmm... Ablative painted over with this material...
I give it forty years.
That's just about enough time for carbon nanotubes to be cheap enough to get added to every second piece of mass produced tat- that part's coming sooner rather than later- played with for five minutes, thrown away, broken down (repeat many, many times) and the resultant nanotubes from said tat to eventually get into the wider environment...
...until we wake up and realise that the nanotubes- whose "real world" behaviour and properties we knew little about before adding them to Furbys with Buckyball Fur (TM)- are a lot more harmful than we thought (Asbestos II: Electric Boogaloo) and that they're literally bloody *everywhere* in the land, sea, environment, our food, etc....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotubes#Toxicity
'Course, this is all just speculation- nanotubes might not be a problem at all, if we're lucky. It might be another nanomaterial like antibacterial silver that turns out to be the problem instead!
http://phys.org/news/2014-01-conflicting-opinions-antibacterial-silver.html
So that means that "visible light enters the material, is absorbed and converted to heat, and (some/much of it) escapes again as IR light"
</pedant mode>
What would be neat would be a material that can remove the heat entirely by conduction, thus minimizing IR emission.
This material is very conductive to heat and is 'grown' on a metal surface (in the photo it's aluminium), so, yes, the heat will have to sink somewhere, but it could be dissipated easily if you have enough surface area on the other side or some other heat sink, like a ground contact, or the jet fuel like in an SR-71.
By lowering the amount of reflected light inside the barrel of telescopes it will lower the error signal hitting the sensor from off axis light sources
By the name I wonder if they are neighbours of SSTL, who've built quite a few space based small telescopes.
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