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On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, a team of artists and scientists has removed a diamond of 16.78 carats worth more than $ 2 million.
Admittedly, the inhabitants of the Stock Exchange are not strangers to large quantities of wealth disappearbut this time scientists are doing most of the work. In collaboration with artist Diemut Strebe, a team of MIT researchers has covered the sparkling yellow diamond with a new type of carbon nanotube coating that turns 3D objects into black voids, almost 100% without light .
According to researchers, who described the coating in a study published September 12 in the newspaper Applied materials and interfaces ACS, this found structure of nanotubes is the darkest black matter ever created, absorbing more than 99.996% of the light touching it.
"Our material is 10 times blacker than anything that has ever been reported," wrote Brian Wardle, lead author of the study, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, said in a statement.
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The team created the new coating accidentally, while trying to design an improved process for growth carbon nanotubes (essentially, microscopic carbon chains) on surfaces such as aluminum paper. They found that one of the problems encountered with the work of aluminum was that an oxide layer was formed whenever the surface was exposed to the open air, creating a troublesome chemical barrier between the nanotubes and the sheet. To eliminate these oxides, the team soaked the leaf in salt water and then moved it to a small furnace where the nanotubes could grow without oxygen interference.
With millions of entangled nanotubes now covering the leaf like a microscopic forest of fur, photons light was lost and had a hard time getting out of the leaf's surface. The team discovered that the film had completely blackened – so black that the edges of the aluminum were completely invisible if we looked at them.
"I remember noticing how black it was before producing carbon nanotubes, and then after growing, it seemed even darker," said study co-author Kehang Cui, a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. "So, I thought I should measure the optical reflectance of the sample."
Cui and colleagues compared the reflectivity of their new coating with other light-absorbing nanostructures, including the previous one. record holder for the dark, Vantablack. Although the differences between the various nanostructures are negligible for the eyes, the researchers found that their coating was much darker than all the blacks tested, regardless of the angle of penetration of the light.
As you can see in the image of the diamond above, the effect is disturbing. Once exposed to the coating, the brilliant yellow diamond apparently loses all its facets, flattening what the artist Diemut Strebe called "a kind of black hole"from which no light or shadow can escape.
Incidentally, this uberdark coating could one day be used to help astronomers see real black holes, by applying the material on telescope-mounted blinds that help reduce star glare. For the moment, however, you will see the diamond-shaped void on the New York Stock Exchange until November 25.
Originally published on Science live.
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