Black Blacker Than Vantablack

[chongli]

I think it would be cool to walk into a room painted entirely with this material. I bet it would be so disorienting that people would fall down and get vertigo. So weird.

[gambiting]

It would just be....completely dark? I had this experience when working at a mine at one point, and if you went down one of the tunnels and switched off your headlamp.....it was absolute darkness. Like, we think that our bedroom at night is "completely dark" - but that's usually not true, that's always some source of light, after some adjustment you can see at least faintly. In an underground corridor without any lights at all it was very uncomfortable, it was like completely losing one sense of perception entirely.

[RangerScience]

You can get Black 2.0 (or wait for 3.0) and do it. As long as you're not Anish Kapoor.

https://www.culturehustleusa.com/products/black-v1-0-beta-th...

[elif]

It is far easier to block light than absorb it. You can experience that type of absolute darkness with a $10 eye-mask (The new ones that look like tiny bras) from your airport. Your ears will orient you if you let them.

[axaxs]

I was thinking about car/plane applications. At first thought, it's "that reflects no light that's a terrible idea". Thinking further, the absolute absence of anything itself stands out from a normal background, day or night. Would be a bit interesting to see.

[gandalfian]

London's tate modern did a similar thing. At open ended black chamber. You blindly inched forwards to the back wall feeling as if you were about to trip over something. Then you turned around and realised with the light coming in the open end it actually wasn't that dark on the way out, its just there was nothing to pick up the light. https://www.studiointernational.com/images/articles/b/balka0...

[okcando]

An almost perfectly black and almost perfectly anechoic chamber with almost zero external sound.

Peaceful or nightmarish?

[sschueller]

It would probably be similar to one of those sound "clean" rooms. After a while you can hear the fluids in your ear and you will feel quite uneasy.

[acjohnson55]

Imagine it also being anechoic.

[xeromal]

Yeah, I'd love to try that out. Imagine waking up in a room painted with that.

[asdfman123]

> Strebe has coated a $2 million (£1.6 million) 16.78-carat natural yellow diamond in the material

Wouldn't it have been smarter to, say, make a glass replica, coat that, and pocket the $2 million diamond?

[chrisseaton]

It's a piece of art - you could reduce the cost in many ways but it's subjective whether you'd be achieving the same thing as it doesn't have any intrinsic value except for how people appreciate it.

[ryacko]

Archimedes solved figuring out for density, there are also other non-destructive tests.

[alasdair_]

Perhaps they did and are lying about the diamond.

[sosuke]

In that case it wouldn't be art but just a demonstration.

[chrisa]

There's a great youtube video called "Darker Than Vantablack" that has a cool demo of light reflecting off of different paints, etc; and at the end he revels how he got such a pure black without vantablack or a darker substance. It's neat! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoLEIiza9Bc

[jcims]

The Action Lab! The first time I saw his channel I honestly didn't take the guy too seriously...but he is super creative and has some really cool ideas that most people could do at home if they wanted to.

[jpindar]

If you want to see something very black, look at the side of a stack of razor blades or x-acto knife blades. The individual blades are shiny, but the geometry of the stack makes it absorb almost all the light hitting it.

[ksynwa]

Found a small blog post about it since I was wondering what it looks like: https://erossel.wordpress.com/2015/08/24/beamdump/

[kazinator]

Another deep black is a small opening (the only one) into a large, hollow object.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohlraum

[MrEldritch]

This is, in fact, the same principle behind how Vantablack works!

[tito]

I love carbon and carbon materials.

Here's an amazing clip showing Vantablack. It's so dark it looks like an optical illusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg2x0L4YAuU

And apparently this stuff is blacker!

[criddell]

I just watched that and at the end they state that you can't buy it because it's subject to UK export controls. The Vantablack website confirms this:

> In order to comply with UK export control regulations we are required to verify the identity and credentials of potential clients and the nature of their proposed use of Vantablack. Only verified companies, research facilities and educational establishments can order a sample of Vantablack. The coating is not available to private individuals at this time and we can’t accept orders from private email addresses.

Assuming it isn't because of it's chemical compositions, why would this be controlled?

[gattr]

An interesting usage example for very black materials (which are required to be effective also at grazing incidence angles) is flocking the insides of amateur telescopes. Not that it's always necessary, but can help in some poor designs where the light beam might reflect off some optical tube elements etc. (which results in a decreased overall contrast).

One of the popular choices these days are adhesive sheets of black velour. Another option is thick dark paint mixed with sawdust.

[fredley]

Quick, before Anish Kapoor finds out.

[kazinator]

"It's like, 'how much more black could this be?' and the answer is 'None. None more black.'"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell_the_Glove

[xori]

Come on journalists, you say they published it, but you don't link to it. Where is the whitepaper?

[tito]

Would love to see it! I don't see anything referenced on Prof Wardel's sites yet unfortunately: http://necstlab.mit.edu/publications http://isn.mit.edu/strategic-research-areas

[nyankosensei]

This appears to be the paper: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.9b08290

[ctdonath]

A white paper on ... black.

[splitbrain]

Does anyone know how stable these coatings are in real life? How easy is it to dust off or wet clean one of those super black coatings? How well would it take daily touching?

[Jaygles]

Would these coatings be useful in solar panels? Does the energy trapped/absorbed by these CNTs turn into heat and does it transfer easily to the material its applied to?

[jerf]

Going from 99% black to 99.999% black turns out not to represent that much more efficiency. It's the difference between absorbing 99 of 100 joules of energy vs 99.999 of 100 joules of energy; unless the rest of your system is effectively 100% efficient, it may not even be a noticeable change. It is very likely that other engineering concerns, not least of which is price, is going to dominate this question.

[thereisnospork]

More likely to find use in something like optics, or cameras, where removing any and all stray light is desirable to reduce noise.

There are a few uses for radiative heat exchangers, so its possible it could also find use there.

[bjoli]

I can't say anything specific to this specific black, but the previous blackest black all had degradation problems which made them unsuitable.

[gabrielbln]

I am concerned with this subject on a daily basis and this is the most civilized and educated discussion I saw until now.

Refreshing, really. Thank you

[anoncow]

In a room with the walls coated with vantablack, a vantablack cloak would be an invisibility cloak.

[redder92]

I believe this is the paper in question: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.9b08290

[redder92]

More than an order of magnitude lower reflectance compared to VANTABLACK and NIST VANTA

[icsllaf]

Would the human eye see the difference between this and Vantablack? Even though it's ten times darker I feel like the returns would get smaller and smaller.

Also, what would 100% light absorption look like?

[jbay808]

In other words, you have to crank up the light source to be 10x brighter to make it reflect as much as vantablack does.

I think the returns are always there when the improvements are on a log scale like that, assuming you care about darkness in the first place.

[axaxs]

In the right environment - the absence of anything. Like a piece was cutout of your vision. Which, to be honest, this resembles as well.

[virgilp]

Shine a very powerful laser on it, and yes, the human eye will be able to tell the difference

[jcims]

>Also, what would 100% light absorption look like?

A hole.

[holy_city]

I feel like they missed the opportunity to name it None More Black [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSkGtW-fQ3s

[Symmetry]

I'd like one of these to be named fuligin as in The Shadow of the Torturer.

[m4r35n357]

At least they aren't copper nanotubes ;)

OK I'll get my coat.