Dark material sets blackness benchmark

23 Jan 2008

The new carbon nanotube material absorbs over 99.9% of the light falling on it.

their dark material

A US team from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Rice University has manufactured a thin coating comprised of low-density arrays of loosely vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes which reflects just 0.045% of incident light. The previous darkest known material was a nickel and phosphorous alloy, claimed to reflect about 0.16% of light.

"When we measured how dark the material was, the final numbers were more dramatic than we thought," said Pulickel Ajayan of Rice University.

The light absorption stems from a combination of the material's structural properties. "First, the material is very porous and has a material filling fraction of 3-5%," explained Shawn-Yu Lin of Rensselaer to optics.org. "This extreme diluteness makes it very non-reflective."

Another factor is the random surface, which diffracts light and further reduces reflectance.

"In addition, the material is made of extremely long carbon nanotubes, 8-10 nm in diameter and 500-1000 µm long," said Lin. "The carbon material and the long structure enable a total absorption of the light that gets in." The reflectance of the nanotube array is said to be two orders of magnitude lower than that of glassy carbon, despite both samples being made of the same element.

black structure

The material's properties could be useful in applications such as solar panel manufacture. "Thermalphotovoltaic (TPV) conversion that requires a complete absorption of light from all angles, at both polarizations and for all wavelengths of interest, could be a possible application," commented Lin.

As the nanotube array is very porous, it is not durable against mechanical force. "The material would need to be covered by some form of thin coating, but this would not limit the TPV application, for example," observed Lin. "We have tested the material's thermal stability by heating it up to 1500 K, and it maintained its structural integrity."

The team now plans to carry out further experiments on the material. "We would like to extend our measurements from visible wavelengths to infrared and microwave regimes, to check the universality of the phenomenon," said Lin. "We also want to develop a comprehensive theory to understand our discovery, and explore the absolute lower limit of reflectance possible using our approach."