Darkest material so far, gets even darker

Vantablack - Surrey Nanosystems
Vantablack – Surrey Nanosystems

Back in 2014, Surrey NanoSystems introduced a material called Vantablack, that until now was the the darkest, most blackest material ever invented. The company claimed the material was capable of absorbing 99.96 percent of light, but apparently this was not dark enough. This week Surrey NanoSystems announced that they’ve made Vantablack even darker, so dark in fact that spectrometers can’t even measure it.

Vantablack is composed of a forest of vertical carbon nanotubes that absorbs radiation in the visible spectrum. When light strikes the material, instead of bouncing off, it becomes trapped and is continually deflected between the tubes before eventually becoming heat. The heat, that is largely undetectable in most applications, is conducted to the substrate and dissipated

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