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The New Black
Rensselaer’s Future Chips Constellation focuses on compound semiconductor materials and devices, materials that increasingly enable advances in communications, lighting, sensing, and imaging. Formed in 2002, the group has already produced a number of research breakthroughs.
The darkest material ever made by man, important for such applications as solar energy conversion and infrared technologies, was created by Shawn-Yu Lin, Future Chips Constellation Professor and professor of physics, and his team in collaboration with researchers at Rensselaer’s Interconnect Focus Center. The ongoing research is supported by the Basic Energy Science program of the Department of Energy.
“The key to this discovery was finding how to create a long, extremely porous, vertically aligned carbon nanotube array with surface randomness, therefore minimizing reflection and maximizing absorption simultaneously,” says Lin. The end result was a material with a total reflective index of 0.045 percent—more than three times darker than the previous record, which used a film deposition of nickel-phosphorous alloy. The research team tested the array over a broad range of visible wavelengths of light, and showed that the nanotube array’s total reflectance remained constant.
The achievement has been accepted by the Guinness Book of World Records, and the Washington Post called the material “a Roach Motel for photons— light checks in, but it never checks out.”
Lin, known for his research in photonic crystals and optical-to-energy conversion, is supported by grants from a variety of sources, including the Department of Energy, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Sandia Lab, NYSTAR (New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation), and Applied Materials.
See also: Presenting the World’s Darkest Man-Made Material (Rensselaer Research Review)
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