Super Black

This tile of material was once covered in a special black coating that was developed by NASA to absorb all visible light. It was designed to be the blackest black stuff anyone had ever seen. It is, however, fragile and has since rubbed off this tile on which it was applied. Traces of the original blackness can just about be seen around the edges of the tile, where a frame that used to house it protected it.

This nanotechnology-based coating is made up of a thin layer of carbon nanotubes (tiny hollow tubes made of pure carbon, about 100,00 times thinner than a human hair). These nanotubes are arranged to stand on end on the surface of the substrate material, like fibres on a shag carpet. The tiny gaps between these tubes collect and trap background light, preventing it from reflecting off the surface. Whereas ordinary black paint absorbs about 90% of light that hits its surface, this coating absorbs up to 99.5% of light. Because such a small amount of light reflects off its surface, we see it as the blackest black.

This material is a relatively early version of a range of super black materials that were first developed in around 2007 with aerospace and optical engineers in mind. These pigments were particularly useful in spacecraft instruments where they could be used to coat the instruments themselves, supressing any reflected and stray background light that might interfere with faint visible and invisible light signals captured from distant astronomical objects. The blacker the material, the more heat it radiates away too, with the added benefit that cooler infra-red spacecraft instruments are better at sensing these faint signals.

These superlative pigments have since been co-opted by both artists (as in the case of the Anish Kapoor and Stuart Semple Vantablack controversy) and car manufacturers in search of the blackest of black voids.

We also have Stuart Semple's tongue-in-cheek Pinkest Pink in the collection (collection number 1502).