
Black Blacker Than Vantablack - compilers
https://www.dezeen.com/2019/09/24/blackest-black-mit-material-news-vantablack/
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chongli
I think it would be cool to walk into a room painted entirely with this
material. I bet it would be so disorienting that people would fall down and
get vertigo. So weird.

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okcando
An almost perfectly black and almost perfectly anechoic chamber with almost
zero external sound.

Peaceful or nightmarish?

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Nextgrid
Wouldn’t a pitch black room achieve the same effect with much less
cost/effort? As far as I know the idea of these compounds is to absorb light,
but if you get rid of light to begin with then you don’t need them?

~~~
pygy_
You don’t experience black in absolute darkness, more of a very dark static-
like fizzling grey. In order to experience the deepest black, you need to
contrast it with something lighter.

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asdfman123
> Strebe has coated a $2 million (£1.6 million) 16.78-carat natural yellow
> diamond in the material

Wouldn't it have been smarter to, say, make a glass replica, coat that, and
pocket the $2 million diamond?

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chrisseaton
It's a piece of art - you could reduce the cost in many ways but it's
subjective whether you'd be achieving the same thing as it doesn't have any
intrinsic value except for how people appreciate it.

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asdfman123
I know. My "joke" is that the artist could have used it as a scheme to steal a
diamond. Not necessarily implying any foul play though.

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rhizome
There's an old cartoon depicting a man standing outside of a Jeff Koons art
show with a table full of inflatable animals and flowers for sale.

A sign says "your friends will never know the difference!"

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v64
Banksy did something similar where he sold art in New York for $60 without
indicating they were his work. [1] After this was revealed, some of those
works that were sold that day went for six figures at auctions.

[1]
[https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2013/oct/14/b...](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2013/oct/14/banksy-
central-park-new-york-video)

~~~
rhizome
That's kind of an opposite, where they bought something they thought was
authentic but not famous, but I take your point.

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chrisa
There's a great youtube video called "Darker Than Vantablack" that has a cool
demo of light reflecting off of different paints, etc; and at the end he
revels how he got such a pure black without vantablack or a darker substance.
It's neat!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoLEIiza9Bc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoLEIiza9Bc)

~~~
jcims
The Action Lab! The first time I saw his channel I honestly didn't take the
guy too seriously...but he is super creative and has some really cool ideas
that most people could do at home if they wanted to.

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jpindar
If you want to see something very black, look at the side of a stack of razor
blades or x-acto knife blades. The individual blades are shiny, but the
geometry of the stack makes it absorb almost all the light hitting it.

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ksynwa
Found a small blog post about it since I was wondering what it looks like:
[https://erossel.wordpress.com/2015/08/24/beamdump/](https://erossel.wordpress.com/2015/08/24/beamdump/)

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tito
I love carbon and carbon materials.

Here's an amazing clip showing Vantablack. It's so dark it looks like an
optical illusion:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg2x0L4YAuU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg2x0L4YAuU)

And apparently this stuff is blacker!

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criddell
I just watched that and at the end they state that you can't buy it because
it's subject to UK export controls. The Vantablack website confirms this:

> In order to comply with UK export control regulations we are required to
> verify the identity and credentials of potential clients and the nature of
> their proposed use of Vantablack. Only verified companies, research
> facilities and educational establishments can order a sample of Vantablack.
> The coating is not available to private individuals at this time and we
> can’t accept orders from private email addresses.

Assuming it isn't because of it's chemical compositions, why would this be
controlled?

~~~
jbay808
It presumably has military applications, such as coating stealthy satellites.

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gattr
An interesting usage example for very black materials (which are required to
be effective also at grazing incidence angles) is flocking the insides of
amateur telescopes. Not that it's always necessary, but can help in some poor
designs where the light beam might reflect off some optical tube elements etc.
(which results in a decreased overall contrast).

One of the popular choices these days are adhesive sheets of black velour.
Another option is thick dark paint mixed with sawdust.

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fredley
Quick, before Anish Kapoor finds out.

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kazinator
"It's like, 'how much more black could this be?' and the answer is 'None. None
more black.'"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell_the_Glove](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell_the_Glove)

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xori
Come on journalists, you say they published it, but you don't link to it.
Where is the whitepaper?

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tito
Would love to see it! I don't see anything referenced on Prof Wardel's sites
yet unfortunately:
[http://necstlab.mit.edu/publications](http://necstlab.mit.edu/publications)
[http://isn.mit.edu/strategic-research-areas](http://isn.mit.edu/strategic-
research-areas)

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splitbrain
Does anyone know how stable these coatings are in real life? How easy is it to
dust off or wet clean one of those super black coatings? How well would it
take daily touching?

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Jaygles
Would these coatings be useful in solar panels? Does the energy
trapped/absorbed by these CNTs turn into heat and does it transfer easily to
the material its applied to?

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jerf
Going from 99% black to 99.999% black turns out not to represent that much
more efficiency. It's the difference between absorbing 99 of 100 joules of
energy vs 99.999 of 100 joules of energy; unless the rest of your system is
effectively 100% efficient, it may not even be a noticeable change. It is very
likely that other engineering concerns, not least of which is price, is going
to dominate this question.

~~~
Zelizz
The article does mention that it's more durable than vantablack, so perhaps
more suitable for a space-based project (if it turns out a really black
material is useful for a solar panel of sorts).

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gabrielbln
I am concerned with this subject on a daily basis and this is the most
civilized and educated discussion I saw until now.

Refreshing, really. Thank you

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anoncow
In a room with the walls coated with vantablack, a vantablack cloak would be
an invisibility cloak.

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redder92
I believe this is the paper in question:
[https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.9b08290](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.9b08290)

~~~
redder92
More than an order of magnitude lower reflectance compared to VANTABLACK and
NIST VANTA

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icsllaf
Would the human eye see the difference between this and Vantablack? Even
though it's ten times darker I feel like the returns would get smaller and
smaller.

Also, what would 100% light absorption look like?

~~~
jbay808
In other words, you have to crank up the light source to be 10x brighter to
make it reflect as much as vantablack does.

I think the returns are always there when the improvements are on a log scale
like that, assuming you care about darkness in the first place.

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holy_city
I feel like they missed the opportunity to name it None More Black [1].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSkGtW-
fQ3s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSkGtW-fQ3s)

~~~
Symmetry
I'd like one of these to be named fuligin as in The Shadow of the Torturer.

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gabrielbln
We developed an ultrablack fabric and totally missed that opportunity.

But then people pointed me towards the book when we did an Iama on reddit and
what an excellent read!

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m4r35n357
At least they aren't copper nanotubes ;)

OK I'll get my coat.

