Stories tagged dark material

Types of carbon nanotubes
Courtesy Wikimedia CommonsUS researchers announced they have created the "darkest man-made material ever", using sheets of carbon just a single atom thick and rolled into tubes.

The nanotubes possess properties that make them great absorbers of light, and - at the same time – very lousy reflectors of it. And by roughing up the tube’s surface, scientists can adjust the material to make it scatter light even more.

"The periodic nanotube structures make an ideal candidate for creating superdark materials, because it allows one to tailor light absorption by controlling the dimensions and periodicities of nanotubes in the structure," said Dr Pulickel Ajayan, of Rice University in Houston, Texas, who led the team of researchers.

This stuff is so dark Ajayan and his team have entered it in the Guinness Book of World Records.

So what good is superdark material? Will it change your life? Just how dark do your groovy sunglasses really need to be?

Well, a super light-absorber could prove to be very useful in such things as electronics, computer chip technology, solar panels and solar-cells, or telescope optics. Just about anything that collects light or solar energy could benefit.

SOURCE
BBC.com
Houston Chronicle story

Tags : energy, nanotechnology, nanotubes, solar energy, dark material

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