Recently, Surrey NanoSystems, a high-tech company near Brighton, England, announced its new invention, Vantablack, which it claims is the blackest black ever seen, or, actually, not seen.
Vantablack, short for Vertically Aligned NanoTube Array, is made of vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays and is the darkest artificial substance known, absorbing up to 99.965% of the radiations in the visible spectrum.
Vantablack is really exciting because the coating reflects so little light that the three dimensions seem to disappear. When you look at Vantablack on some wrinkled aluminum foil, it looks like a black, flat, featureless void, even with your eyes right up to it. That and the fact that it’s the darkest material ever created.
Carbon nanotubes are almost like an alien material from “Star Trek.” Imagine a drinking straw, closed at one end, with a wall one-atom thick. This straw is one-ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, but it is 10 times stronger than steel, and 10 times better at conducting heat than copper. Electrons travel through it with almost no resistance. Vantablack packs billions of these straws together.
If we talk about the usability of Vantablack, Ultrablack coatings, wiring in microchips, enhancing the strength of components in the aerospace industry, touch screens, ultralight wiring, are there to name a few. Architects want to create unique optical effects in a building, and to absorb heat and put it out. Vantablack is not a color, it’s the almost complete absence of color.