These are very, very long aspect ratios of, like, a million. Carbon nanotubes will sprout out of those metallic particles, like plants from seeds.īrian Wardle: You do it in the way we've done it here, you get the recipe right, you can create forests. Then you bake it at high temperatures, in the presence of a hydrocarbon gas. First, you cover a material with microscopic metal particles. They may not be alive, but you can actually grow carbon nanotubes. In this case, Wardle and his team grew them on top of aluminum. And that likely has to do with the structure of those nanotubes themselves. Narrator: The new material, which Wardle has yet to name, is 10 times blacker than any other color ever reported. And so it kind of caused, really, from this art project, the research to find the blackest black. Strebe: Brian was looking into the optical properties of CNTs only because of the art project.

But little did Wardle know, he was producing something even darker than Vantablack. He was working with a material called carbon nanotubes, the same stuff used to make Vantablack, though he was using them to boost the thermal and electrical properties of materials like aluminum. Narrator: Meanwhile, a scientist named Brian Wardle was on a totally different mission. Her goal was to make a diamond disappear.ĭiemut Strebe: This project explores how values attach to concepts and objects in reference to luxury and art and society. In 2014, she set out on a mission to find the blackest black. It all traces back to this artist, Diemut Strebe. And that's thanks to an unprecedented collaboration between science and art. But this color here? It's not Vantablack. It was unveiled in 2014, and media outlets called it the darkest color in the world. Narrator: You may remember this color, Vantablack. But why is it covering a $2 million diamond? And how was it made in the first place? In fact, this material is so dark that it captures at least 99.995% of incoming visible light. And the reason you can't see it is because it's covered with the darkest color on Earth. Narrator: Believe it or not, this is a diamond. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

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