Helion sez, “Good news for goth clothing – darkest ever material created from a forest of nearly totally light-absorbing carbon nanotubes.
Dark forest indeed.”
A team led by Dr Pulickel Ajayan, who is presently at Rice University in Houston, Texas, built an array of vertically aligned, low-density carbon nanotubes. Dr Shawn Lin measured the optical properties.The roughness of the material’s surface was tuned to minimise its optical reflectance.
Experiments showed that this “forest” of carbon nanotubes was very good at absorbing light, and very poor at reflecting it.
None more black!
(Thanks, Helion!)
(Image: Blue’n’black, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from szeretlek_ma’s Flickr stream)