London - British scientists have created a new “super black” material that is darker than any other man-made substance.
It absorbs more than 99 percent of visible light and is as close to a black hole as we can imagine.
The material is so dark the human eye cannot understand what it is seeing.
With virtually no light reflected, shapes and contours simply vanish – as though you are staring into an abyss.
If it was ever used to make clothing, the wearer of one of Chanel’s little back dresses, for example, would just look like arms and legs floating around a dress-shaped hole.
“It’s like black, like a hole, like there’s nothing there. It just looks so strange,” Ben Jensen, of Surrey NanoSystems, told the Independent on Sunday.
The Vantablack coating is made of tiny carbon tubes – each 10 000 times thinner than a human hair – and has been grown on sheets of aluminium foil by its Newhaven-based maker.
Because the “nanotubes” are so tiny, light particles cannot enter them and are absorbed in gaps between them.
As well as military applications, which Mr Jensen declined to discuss, Vantablack is expected to be used in astronomical cameras, telescopes and infrared scanning systems.
Professor Stephen Westland, of Leeds University, said: “Unless you are looking at a black hole, nobody has actually seen something which has no light.
“These new materials, they are pretty much as black as we can get, almost as close to a black hole as we could imagine.” - Daily Mail