(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.
Black 2.0 and Black 3.0 are blacker, easier to apply, safer, and free to use without an onerous contract.
(extremely Kosh voice): "And so it begins..."
I remember reading an article years ago about how they name these things. Apparently the standard naming convention is [element symbol]NT, so Carbon Nanotubes becomes CNT which looks a little rude until you realise someone also developed Copper Nanotubes
But is it alive?