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Black has gotten blacker
Motorhead
Member UncommonPosts: 1,193
Cool article.... 
Their Deepest, Darkest Discovery
Scientists Create a Black That Erases Virtually All Light
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 20, 2008; A01
Black is getting blacker.
Researchers in New York reported this month that they have created a paper-thin material that absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made -- about 30 times as dark as the government's current standard for blackest black.
The material, made of hollow fibers, is a Roach Motel for photons -- light checks in, but it never checks out. By voraciously sucking up all surrounding illumination, it can give those who gaze on it a dizzying sensation of nothingness.
"It's very deep, like in a forest on the darkest night," said Shawn-Yu Lin, a scientist who helped create the material at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. "Nothing comes back to you. It's very, very, very dark."
But scientists are not satisfied. Using other new materials, some are trying to manufacture rudimentary Harry Potter-like cloaks that make objects inside of them literally invisible under the right conditions -- the pinnacle of stealthy technology.
Both advances reflect researchers' growing ability to manipulate light, the fleetest and most evanescent of nature's offerings. The nascent invisibility cloak now being tested, for example, is made of a material that bends light rays "backward," a weird phenomenon thought to be impossible just a few years ago.
Known as transformation optics, the phenomenon compels some wavelengths of light to flow around an object like water around a stone. As a result, things behind the object become visible while the object itself disappears from view.
"Cloaking is just the tip of the iceberg," said Vladimir Shalaev, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University and an expert in the fledgling field. "With transformation optics you can do many other tricks," perhaps including making things appear to be located where they are not and focusing massive amounts of energy on microscopic spots.
U.S. military and intelligence agencies have funded the cloaking research "for obvious reasons," said David Schurig, a physicist and electrical engineer at North Carolina State University who recently designed and helped test a cloaking device. In that experiment, a shielded object a little smaller than a hockey puck was made invisible to a detector that uses microwaves to "see."
The first working cloaks will be limited that way, he said -- able to steer just a limited part of the light spectrum around objects -- and it could be years before scientists make cloaks that work for all wavelengths, including the visible spectrum used by the human eye.
But even cloaks that work on just a few key wavelengths could offer huge benefits, making objects invisible to laser beams used for weapons targeting, for example, or rendering an enemy's night goggles useless because objects would be invisible to the infrared rays those devices use.
The Defense Department did not fund development of the new blacker-than-black material, created by Lin and his colleagues. But military officials were among the first to call after a description of the work appeared in this month's issue of the journal Nano Letters, Lin said in an interview.
Substances that absorb every smidgeon of incoming visible light could complement existing stealth coatings that absorb radar waves, Lin said. He and others emphasized, however, that there are also peaceful and more immediate applications for the blackest stuff on Earth.
Solar panels coated with it would be much more efficient than those coated with conventional black paint, which reflects 5 percent or more of incoming light. Telescopes lined with it would sop up random flecks of incidental light, providing a blacker background to detect faint stars.
And a wide array of heat detectors and energy-measuring devices, including climate-tracking equipment on satellites, would become far more accurate than they are today if they were coated with energy-grabbing superblack.
That helps explain why Lin has been fielding queries from solar-energy companies such as SolFocus of Mountain View, Calif., and the European Space Agency.
"The more black the material the better," said Gerald Fraser, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency that specializes in fine measurements and industrial standards.
That agency offers scientists a chemical mix it calls "standard black," which for years has been the defining measure of blackness. Photographers and printers use it to calibrate their gray scales. Industrial radiologists use it to calibrate X-ray imaging systems that detect radiation or hidden defects in building materials.
That black reflects about 1.4 percent of incoming visible light, and in recent years it has become somewhat outmoded. In 2003, scientists developed a substance made of nickel and phosphorus that reflected just 0.17 percent of visible light, winning it a Guinness World Records listing and kudos in Time magazine as one of that year's 300 "coolest inventions."
The newest black -- which when held next to something conventionally black, such as a tuxedo jacket, is noticeably blacker -- reflects just 0.045 percent of visible light.
It is made of carbon nanotubes: microscopic, hollow fibers whose walls are just one atom thick. Importantly, the fibers are widely spaced, providing plenty of space to allow light in and almost no surfaces to bounce it back out.
"There are a lot of materials that are very absorbing of light so that once the light gets in, very little is reflected. That is not the big issue," said John Pendry, a physics professor at Imperial College London. "The big issue is persuading the light to go in there in the first place" -- something the New York team accomplished by spacing the nanotubes so widely.
While Lin and his colleagues, including Pulickel Ajayan, now at Rice University, pursue applications for their superblack, Pendry and others are hoping to go further by perfecting complete invisibility. The big difference is that a superblack object, even if invisible to the eye, still casts a shadow behind it, while an object shielded by an invisibility cloak does not.
Pendry pioneered much of modern thinking about how to attain full invisibility using "metamaterials" -- substances engineered to manhandle light. Ordinary matter, such as glass or water, slows and bends light as it passes through. Metamaterials contain bits of metal or other substances embedded in precise patterns to make the light bend in an opposite direction from normal paths.
"In a sense you have some negative space," Pendry said. "The light appears to go backward in space."
The first generation, metamaterial "cloaks" are not thin and flexible like Harry Potter's imagined version but are inches thick and solid, resembling canisters, making them able to hide a stationary object but not a moving person. But the science is progressing quickly, physicist Schurig said.
To make a thin, flexible metamaterial cloak, Schurig said, "is technically challenging but not fundamentally impossible." And although no cloak can yet make objects fully invisible to the human eye, he added, it may not be long before scientists can bend the visible spectrum enough to make an object hard to see.
That object might be found "if you know what you are looking for," Schurig said. "But if you're just scanning, then partial invisibility may allow something to go unnoticed."
There is a flip side to the emerging ability to manipulate light, scientists say. "Think anti-cloaking," said Shalaev, the engineering professor. "Instead of excluding light from an object, you can concentrate light in a small area."
Normally, light cannot be squeezed into a space smaller than its own wavelength, he said, but transformation optics create the possibility of accomplishing just that -- packing loads of energy into a vanishingly small space. Such beams could pack a destructive punch, or could be tamed to serve as ultrasensitive needlelike probes, able to detect even a single molecule of some substance of interest.
Pendry added a cautionary note about invisible cloaks, making a real-life distinction from the stuff of fiction: People inside them will not be able to see out. By definition, if no light is bouncing off them, none can reach their eyes, either. "You'd have to use signals other than light to communicate," Pendry said.
Asked for an example of what would work, he paused for a moment.
"You could always talk to them," he said.
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"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb." -- Batman
Comments
I'd love to see it in person.
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"Io rido, e rider mio non passa dentro;
Io ardo, e l'arsion mia non par di fore."
-Machiavelli
Absolutely fascinating. I would also love to see it up close. I'm intrigued by this sensation they describe when looking at the substance. And who knew that such stealth technology was so close to reality?
sounds trippy. can we jump through it too? wow. there is no end to science.
-I will subtlety invade your psyche-
They should make clothes out of this, think of all the untapped goth markets they would clean up in...
"Finally, a color that's blacker than black. Gaze into this shirt, and know your doom mortal!"
same here.
Your argument is like a two legged dog with an eating disorder...weak and unbalanced.
As long as this dosent raise the population of goths and emo's its cool.
Nice. Would love to see it in reality, not much use of seeing it on a pic and describing it doesn't come close to seeing it for yourself.
Neat, this story was actually in the latest issue of one of the science magazines I subscribe to.
You imagine black is black but that is obviously not true, I to would love some first hand experience of this material.
Human ingenuity never stops to amaze me, been re-watching every horizon episode since 1982 the last week due to being home sick, this thing would surely qualify for an episode..
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Originally posted by Jerek_
I wonder if you honestly even believe what you type, or if you live in a made up world of facts.
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story is somewhat old...
Check out the picture.. Left circle is the old record holder for the blackest black.. the Center is the carbon nano tube carpet... and the right is a piece of glossy carbon.
The picture was taken with a really bright flash.
What's your Wu Name?
Donovan --> Wu Name = Violent Knight
Methane47 --> Wu Name = Thunderous Leader
"Some people call me the walking plank, 'cuz any where you go... Death is right behind you.."
<i>ME<i>
Wow, meth, so the middle one is actually a 3d object?!
-In memory of Laura "Taera" Genender. Passed away on Aug/13/08-
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RISING DRAGOON ~AION US ONLINE LEGION for Elyos
Yea i remember reading about this stuff over a year ago. Apparently that black colouring costs something like $10,000 per square Inch. Nether less i would probably buy a bit of it if it ever came on market just so that i can own a new colour [which it is as true black doesnt exist in nature.
Another great example of Moore's Law. Give people access to that much space (developers and users alike) and they'll find uses for it that you can never imagine. "640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates 1981
Its actually not a coloring at all.. its an object.. You might be confusing this with the femto ray blast that turns metal black..
This is actually an object made of carbon nano tubes which are positioned to lay on their ends.. and they are packed in tightly.. Actually.. The same guy who found this... used the same technology to make the worlds smallest brush.. you can look it up..
So when light hits the array of nano tubes.. it actually gets trapped inside the tiny spaces between the tubes.... So it absorbs most of the light that hits it's body
most interesting theoretical applications for the tech are Stealth, and solar power panels.. etc etc.
What's your Wu Name?
Donovan --> Wu Name = Violent Knight
Methane47 --> Wu Name = Thunderous Leader
"Some people call me the walking plank, 'cuz any where you go... Death is right behind you.."
<i>ME<i>
Military will have this to themselves and will never let it go public for any sort of application. My guess is that it will be placed on new aircraft maybe redo the F-117's with this? It sounds cool.