(upbeat music)
- [Cory] What you're seeing here is an optical illusion,
but it's not the kind that tricks your brain
into seeing something that isn't there.
This literally prevents your eyes from seeing
something that is there.
The mask on the table here is coated
with a bizarre compound called vantablack,
which is known as one of the darkest
materials on the planet.
Remarkable as Vantablack is, it's actually a happy accident.
The researchers who created it were working
with a material that holds much broader promises.
It's a material that was supposed to change the world
a few times over.
- [Man] Looks like a simple black powder,
but it may as well be gold.
- [Cory] That hasn't quite happened yet,
but the researchers did create a sensation
that no one saw coming
and a substance that's pretty hard to see at all.
(gentle music)
Vantablack is developed by a company based in the UK
called Surrey NanoSystems.
Ben Jensen is the company's founder.
- My role at Surrey NanoSystems is to lead
the science and development of our super black coatings.
Those are coatings that range with reflectancies
from 1% down to almost unmeasurable.
- {Cory] Here's what that means.
At a very basic level, we see an object
because light reflects off of it and it hits our eyes.
The more light that is absorbed rather than reflected
back at us, the darker the object.
Vantablack works by coating an object
in a mess of microscopic structures.
One varion is laid out by a thicket of aligned hairs,
while another is arranged more like a coral.
In either case, the structures act like a maze
for incoming photons.
- [Ben] Photons can get into and be trapped and absorbed,
so that means when you look at it, so little light
comes back to your eyes that you see absolutely nothing.
It's just a black surface, even when it's coated
onto a three-dimensional structure.
- [Cory] Now, Ben didn't set out to enter the Guinness
Book of World Records for black paint.
As far back as 2007, he'd been chasing
a very particular white whale of material science,
carbon nanotubes, and he wasn't the only one.
- [Boris] Ah, this was very exciting time and
it was new and the expectations were very high.
- [Cory] Boris Yakobson is a professor at Rice
University who has been working on
carbon nanotubes since 1995,
just a few years after their discovery.
Nanotubes are as small as they sound.
Carbon cylinders with walls as thin as one atom.
If you unfurl the nanotube, you would get another
extremely promising and hyped material, Graphene.
And like Graphene they come with an exciting list of
theoretical uses, as a semiconductor that
out performs silicone or as a building material
with unparalleled lightness and tensile strength.
- Bridges..I mean it is not realized yet
but flying vehicles, space ships..
- Or in extreme imaginings, elevators to space.
- They have this article written long ago
This is a space with a great image.
This is a cover of a magazine.
- [Cory] Like Graphene though, the promise
of carbon nanotubes hasn't always meshed
with the realities of research and development.
Producing them is actually pretty doable,
but getting perfectly formed nanotubes at high
volume is another story.
- [Boris] You can do it.
You can produce many tons of nanotubes, but they may
be in bad quality or not processable
Which is difficult to convert into something useful,
because you cannot bring to people one nanotube
and say "Enjoy".
- Carbon nanotubes have found their way
into some industries.
They fortify sports equipment like tennis rackets
and help to shield spacecraft.
Nanotubes are also showing up in transistors
and lithium ion batteries.
That's actually where Ben began his work trying
to integrate nannotubes into semi-conductor technology,
but the equipment they built to grow the nanotubes
proved useful for something else entirely.
- [Ben] It was really serendipity.
It's kind of like, you know, we grew this materials
in partnership with a National Physical Laboratory
as a test to make something with a reflectance of about 1%.
and then all of a sudden they came back to us and said
this is almost immeasurably black,
and that's when we knew we had really nailed it.
- [Cory] The trick is that carbon nanotubes are great
for building those complex microscopic structures,
the nanoforests in coral reefs that
trap photons so effectively.
They weren't the first.
NASA has been chasing ultra black materials for some time,
but Vantablack can be applied to materials
at much lower temperatures than previous efforts.
Some can be sprayed on at room temperature which opens
up a much wider variety of applications,
but what are the applications?
For starters, it is useful whenever you are dealing
with more light than you want
and that actually happens a lot in space.
- [Ben] So for example in space, every body thinks
it's kinda dark up there, but actually it's
incredibly bright.
You look at an astronaut doing a space walk,
almost glowing white.
That's because the sun is not being absorbed
by the earth's atmosphere and it's brilliantly
bright up there so one of the main applications
is absorbing the stray light from the sun, the moon
and the earth so telescopes and camera systems can see
the stars in much better detail.
- Here on earth, Vantablack can be used in other lenses
to help camera operators capture bright light sources
without washing the image out.
- But if they are taking a tracking shot across the sun
or shooting into the sun, then you get something
called ghosting within the lens system,
and we use Vantablack in commercial lens systems
to eliminate that ghosting artifact that you get.
- And then there are the less technical uses.
Vantablack has been used to promote a videogame
inside an all black room,
and to boost contrast on a $95,000 watch face.
There is also artist Anish Kapoor, who painted
a large hold with Vantablack for an art installation
which someone promptly fell into.
Vantablack has become so popular that
the company developed a new formulation VBX that
doesn't use carbon nanotubes at all.
Nanotubes, themselves, may be damaging to your lungs
if you inhale them so VBX is a safer alternative.
But it's notable that carbon nanotubes launched
a whole new business that is now leaving them behind.
- [Ben] I think it's amazing watching people's reactions
every time.
It doesn't matter how often they see it, people will just
go "I gotta look at it again".
- It's hard to communicate the unique strangeness
of Vantablack with video.
On a screen you just kinda see a cutout of where the
object should be
but so much of Vantablack's popularity clearly comes down
to the affect that it has on people.
Our producer, Sophie, was on the shoot at Surrey Nanosystems
in the UK and we asked her what it looked like in person.
- I thought I was like....I did a lot of research
before I went so I knew what I was getting myself into.
And then you see it, and you know what you're going to see,
and it still messes with you.