Recently, I have got hooked onto the ABC series ‘Once Upon A Time’ thanks to the arrival of Netflix in my life – it came as a package deal with the fiancé. I’m up to Season 3, and thought that things couldn’t possibly get darker than Peter Pan’s shadow, whose mysterious features are barely distinguishable, whose actions are deplorable, and whose voice is provided by the marvelous Marilyn Manson. How wrong I was.
A year ago, Sam Lemonick wrote about a material called Vantablack and its spray-on version, Vantablack S-VIS, both created by Surrey NanoSystems. This month the company released some videos showcasing a new non-carbon-nanotube material that they are currently developing that is also 'ultra-black' though it is not made of carbon nanotubes like its predecessor Vantablack.
Vantablack absorbs so much light that it masks all depth and sense of three-dimensional relief of an object, and makes the observer feel like they are looking into a gaping hole so dark that it could almost be connecting them to a far-off galaxy from an episode of Doctor Who.
Not only have the team at Surrey NanoSystems released a very impressive video showcasing just how good Vantablack is at masking relief using a pair of very characteristic bronze head for comparison, they have also admitted that the material is so dark that the usual highly technical analytical methods do not work on this material.
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This is because many of the analytical methods used to characterize materials are based on spectroscopy, which is the investigation of a material using wavelengths of light, and studying the effect that the material has on this electromagnetic radiation, whether that is ultra-violet light, visible light, infra-red light, or something beyond both of these extremes of visible light. If a material is capable of absorbing almost all of that light, the analytical techniques used to find out more about the material in question simply will not be able to characterize the material, as so little of the energy is reflected back as it is absorbed by the material.
The scientists in the video demonstrate this using a red laser and a newly developed version of Vantablack that the video caption claims is even darker than the original Vantablack. As the red laser light shines on the surrounding supportive material, the dot of the laser is visible as a proportion of the light is reflecting back to the camera lens, while some of it is slightly scattered due to the microscopically uneven surface that results in a slight softening of the edges of the laser light dot.