A black body absorber from vertically aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 19339498.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1073/pnas.0900155106 and PMC identifier 2669394.
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Abstract
Among all known materials, we found that a forest of vertically aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes behaves most similarly to a black body, a theoretical material that absorbs all incident light. A requirement for an object to behave as a black body is to perfectly absorb light of all wavelengths. This important feature has not been observed for real materials because materials intrinsically have specific absorption bands because of their structure and composition. We found a material that can absorb light almost perfectly across a very wide spectral range (0.2-200 mum). We attribute this black body behavior to stem from the sparseness and imperfect alignment of the vertical single-walled carbon nanotubes.