There's a New Blackest Material Ever, and It's Eating a Diamond As We Speak

[Judi Lynn]

By Brandon Specktor - Senior Writer 5 hours ago Tech

It's so black, it turns diamonds into "black holes."



A new exhibition in New York turns a sparkling yellow diamond (left) into a veritable black hole (right) thanks to the blackest material ever created.(Image: © R. Capanna, A. Berlato, and A. Pinato)

On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, a team of artists and scientists have made a 16.78-carat diamond — valued at more than $2 million — disappear.

Granted, denizens of the Stock Exchange are no strangers to making vast amounts of wealth vanish, but this time the scientists are doing the heavy lifting. Working with artist Diemut Strebe, a team of researchers from MIT covered the shimmering yellow diamond in a newly discovered type of carbon nanotube coating that turns 3D objects into black, almost 100% light-free voids.

According to the researchers, who described the coating in a study published Sept. 12 in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, this newfound nanotube structure is the blackest of black materials ever created, absorbing more than 99.996% of any light that touches it.

"Our material is 10 times blacker than anything that's ever been reported," lead study author Brian Wardle, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, said in a statement.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/blackest-black-devours-diamond.html

[Beakybird]

1. A shiny penny could "make the diamond disappear" if placed in front of it.

What makes this material so special?

[flotsam]

2. My first thought was solar heaters...N/T

[cos dem]

3. None more black!

[Duppers]

4. Fascinating!

A perfect camouflage.

[NNadir]

5. It sounds really interesting. That journal is too huge to follow completely, but I'll pick...

...the original paper up.