17 January 2008

A darker shade of black

If you are a Father Ted fan you will know that the only truly black clothes you can get are from Habit Hat (ntbcw Habitat of course). Anything else is merely very, very, very, very, very, very, very dark blue. If you are not a Ted fan of any stripe then that reference is utterly meaningless (a bit like an American referencing Gilligan’s Island to a Briton). However, an American laboratory has apparently created the darkest ever substance known to science.

According to researchers the material, which was created from carbon nanotubes, is the closest thing yet to the ideal black material, which absorbs light perfectly at all angles and over all wavelengths. The discovery is expected to have applications in the fields of electronics and solar energy.

An ideal black object absorbs all the colours of light and reflects none of them. In theory, it should be possible to make something that approaches the "perfect absorber". But it has proved difficult to construct an object that does not reflect light at all. A team led by Dr Pulickel Ajayan built an array of vertically aligned, low-density carbon nanotubes. 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.

Reporting their findings in the journal Nano Letters, Dr Ajayan and colleagues say the reflectance of the material is three times lower than previously achieved which makes it the "darkest man-made material ever".

"The periodic nanotube structures make an ideal candidate for creating superdark materials, because it allows one to tailor light absorption by controlling the dimensions and periodicities of nanotubes in the structure," said Dr Ajayan. Commenting on the study, Professor Sir John Pendry, who first predicted that such a discovery might be possible, said "The application will be to things like more efficient solar cells, more efficient solar panels and any application where you need to harvest light," he added.

Oh and socks that aren’t very, very, very, very, very, very, very dark blue.....

2 comments:

Dragonstar said...

That looks very interesting stuff. Be a while before we can buy any though!
My sons are great Father Ted fans. Why did they never tell me about Habit Hat?

jams o donnell said...

AH it was in the first episode of teh thrid series when Ted offends Craggy Island's Chinese community!