Name: The Hunt for the Blackest Black
Uploaded: 2025-01-20T02:43:08.000Z
Duration: 12 min 37 s
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It's been 10 years since Vantablack claimed the title of Blackest Black, astounding the world with its ability to darken materials beyond recognition.

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This proprietary coating completely obscures an object's surface features, causing it to appear like a dark 2D void.

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But over the past decade, coatings have gotten even darker, and Vantablack is no longer the world's Blackest Black.

Scientists have unlocked new techniques for producing increasingly absorptive materials, mostly by accident.

And good news for goths everywhere, you might be able to buy some of this stuff yourself one day.

In the search for Blackest Black, there are two things to consider.

What do we mean by black, and how do we measure it?

Black is generally considered the absence of colored light.

Humans perceive color when our brains interpret signals from our eyes, where tiny receptors go ping when they're hit by light with the correct wavelengths.

So if an object is neither emitting nor reflecting enough of that visible light, our receptors don't get triggered, and we perceive the thing as black.

To an infrared camera, I am positively glowing right now.

So from a broader physics perspective, black is defined as the absence of reflection at any wavelength.

And the lower a material's reflectance, the blacker it is.

However, you can pick and choose how you measure that reflectance and get different results.

Even materials that look black aren't equally reflective, or should I say non-reflective, at every single wavelength.

Your material might be better or worse at reflecting a beam of light depending on the angle the light is hitting it.

So if you were gunning for our record for Blackest Black, you could go for the lowest reflectance that only appears at a specific angle and for a specific wavelength of light.

But you'd probably have a beef with a research team that developed a material with a lower overall reflectance.

So scientists usually measure reflectance as the total light scattered in any direction.

A reflectance of 100% means your material is the whitest white, and 0% is the blackest black.

The terms aren't official, but super blacks tend to be materials with a reflectance of less than 0.5%, which is about 10 times less reflective than your blackest paints.

Meanwhile, ultra blacks are less than 0.05%.

Well, that light gets absorbed by the molecules in the material and converted into a different kind of energy.

And eventually, the molecules emit that energy as heat.

That's why dark colors feel so warm after spending time in direct light.

All that absorption is why you've got everyone from astronomers to people trying to improve solar panel efficiency pursuing the blackest blacks.

If you can find something to paint the inside of your telescope, you can help wrangle any errant light rays from scattering around and messing up your astronomical observations.

Or if you find something that stops a solar cell bouncing a bunch of sunlight back into the atmosphere, you can maximize the amount of energy your solar panels can convert into electricity.

But before there were super black materials, there were normal black materials.

Humans have used black pigments to create art for at least 12,000 years.

One example is charcoal, which is still popular in art classrooms across the world.

Charcoal is made through a process called carbonization, where organic material is burned using very little oxygen so that the big and complex carbon-based molecules break down and leave behind mostly pure carbon.

The purer the carbon in your final product, the darker your charcoal is.

That's because it's the carbon that's responsible for charcoal, as well as some other black pigments, being black.

Thanks to its atomic structure, carbon absorbs light across a wide range of wavelengths.

So if you have a really pure charcoal sample, you can get a reflectance less than 10% across the visible light spectrum.

But carbon isn't the only compound capable of absorbing light.

Humans used other pigments in art, such as squid ink, and that mostly gets its color from complex molecules called melanin.

You might remember that melanins are responsible for color pigmentation across the animal kingdom, including humans.

Then, starting in the 19th century, chemists discovered they could design pigment molecules.

Colors like cadmium red, cobalt blue, and chromium green are named after the ingredients whose structure makes them reflect certain wavelengths of light.

These discoveries eventually led to a black paint with reflectance of less than 3%.

And if you're looking to create your own goth paradise, you can actually buy cans of the stuff.

But for a while, that was the best we could do.

And to get even less reflective, we needed some help from physics.

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It's not just an object's chemical makeup that dictates how much light it absorbs, and therefore how black it is.

But for a long time, it was super tricky to create the super small structures you'd need to make blacks even blacker.

Then in 2002, a brand new record was set.

A material that reflected less than 0.5% of visible light wavelengths.

And researchers achieved this by chemically eroding the surface, creating microscopic, light-absorbing craters.

It was a huge leap in the search for the blackest black.

But unfortunately, the method didn't work very well at infrared wavelengths.

And for many practical purposes, these light-absorbing materials should be great at that, too.

Then in the 2010s, a brand new technique hit the scene, and it really seemed to knock all the previous records out of the park.

Now a little warning here, the materials we're talking about from now on are so black that your screen can't even express how black they are, so you'll have to trust us a bit when we tell you that these materials are really stunningly black.

Enter Vantablack, which claimed the world record for blackest black at the time.

Vanta is actually an acronym for Vertically Aligned Nanotube Array.

And by nanotube, they mean carbon nanotubes.

Because VACDNA doesn't really roll off the tongue.

By the time Vantablack rolled around, academic labs and government research facilities like

NASA had already been working on this kind of technology for a couple years.

These super black coatings are created by growing forests of carbon nanotubes.

And carbon nanotubes are very appropriately named because they're nanoscale tubes of pure carbon.

Each of these trees are millionths of a meter tall, and billionths of a meter wide.

And together, a nanotube forest can trap light and bounce it around the trees until it's absorbed by the carbon atoms.

In other words, carbon nanotube forests are a perfect combination of the carbon-based black pigments and the structure-based absorption properties that scientists could achieve through chemical etching.

So super black Vanta coatings consistently reflect less than 0.5% of light across visible and infrared wavelengths.

Before Vantablack came on the scene, several labs had demonstrated near-perfect absorption — less than 0.1% in the visible and near-infrared bands.

But in 2014, Vantablack coined the catchiest name and thereby got all the hype.

As for the world record, well, the company's research is closely guarded.

The level of black was supposedly independently verified, but not publicly peer-reviewed.

If you go by those numbers, the original Vantablack had reflectances as low as 0.05%, at least for visible light.

And the record-breaking contest has only accelerated since then.

In 2015, a team created a super-efficient light absorber by suspending some funny-shaped nanoscale gold particles in water.

Using the same principle as the carbon nanotube forests, these gold particles use their shape to bounce light between one another until its energy is totally dissipated.

When you look at the numbers, the reflectance isn't quite as impressive as Vantablack — less than 2% of light across both visible and infrared wavelengths.

But the gold particles are more reliable across a range of wavelengths than Vantablack was.

And they require far less material than carbon nanotubes in order to absorb the same amount of light.

Together, that was good enough for the Guinness Book of World Records to dub these gold nanoparticles as the new Blackest Black.

Then, in 2016, Vantablack beat the record with — wait for it — Vantablack 2!

With this new iteration, they clarified that across a broad spectrum of wavelengths, and viewed from all angles, Vantablack 2 always reflects less than 1% of light.

But Vantablack isn't the current record-holder, and today's Blackest Black was discovered by accident.

In 2019, researchers were trying to boost the electrical conductance of aluminum.

And it turns out the ability to move electrons around is closely related to the ability to absorb light.

So the team wound up discovering a coding process that reflects less than 0.01% of visible and infrared light from all angles.

It even reflected less than 0.005% of certain wavelengths, making this new material not just super, but ultra black.