Vantablack: One of the darkest materials ever made (2024)

FAQs

Vantablack: One of the darkest materials ever made? ›

It's made out of tiny, hollow carbon tubes, the size of a single atom — about 3,500 times thinner than the width of a human hair. Like a forest, these tubes are 10,000 times as long as they are wide and so tightly packed together in a matrix that they absorb virtually all light (up to 99.96%) that hits them.

Firstly, Acktar black is made from inorganic materials, which tend to be less expensive than carbon nanotubes, the primary material used in Vantablack. Carbon nanotubes are known to be expensive to produce, and this cost is likely reflected in the price of Vantablack.

Looking at it the other way, Black 4.0 reflects 0.05% of the light, and Vantablack 0.035%. So Black 4.0 reflects about 40% more light. The difference is not that small. On the other hand, Vantablack is highly toxic (similar to asbestos), while Black 4.0 should be quite a lot safer.

Vantablack S-VIS and S-IR coatings are not supplied to private individuals.

Original CVD Vantablack is no longer manufactured for commercial applications as it has been superseded by Vantablack spray coatings that offer similar optical performance in key parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Because Vantablack is not produced as paint or pigment in the traditional sense, NanoSystems says it is “generally not suitable for use in art due to the way in which it's made.” A form of the substance that can be sprayed onto surfaces, called Vantablack S-VIS, requires “specialist application,” the company says.

Vantablack releases incoming radiation as heat—a principle familiar to anyone who has worn a black T-shirt on a summer day—but it does not reflect light.

There's a paint, a “material,” that an artist patented, and no one else is allowed to use it. Anish Kapoor bought the exclusive rights to Vantablack, the blackest black available to artists. (Feel free to insert a “Spinal Tap” joke here, if you are of a certain age.)

Since the Vantablack vinyl absorbs up to 99.965% of visible light, this could make the car wrapped in this vinyl difficult to view, especially in low-light conditions or at night.

Only five years after Vantablack was discovered, MIT had found a black which is ten times darker. This new black captures 99.995 percent of all incoming light. Funnily enough, the scientists who discovered the new color were not trying to create the blackest black at all.

What is the closest paint to Vantablack? ›

Vantablack's darkness has since been swallowed by MIT's Singularity Black, which can deflect “at least” 99.995-percent direct light. The closest match to the commercial Musou Black is Stuart Semple's ready-to-buy Black 3.0, which can trap 99-percent incoming light.

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Where does the light go? Basically, it gets trapped inside the material. Vantablack, as the material is called, is made by tightly packing carbon nanotubes — rods of carbon that are much, much thinner than any human hair — so close together that light goes in, but can't escape.

What's the blackest thing in the world? Vantablack, a material developed by Surrey NanoSystems in the UK. Vantablack is made up of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, which trap and absorb light. This results in an extremely low reflectance, with the material absorbing up to 99.965% of visible light.

British sculptor Anish Kapoor made history when he bought exclusive rights to the Vantablack pigment, aka the world's “blackest black.”

Vantablack is the brand name for a new class of super-black coatings. The coatings are unique in that they all have hemispherical reflectances below 1% and also retain that level of performance from all viewing angles.