A black body absorber from vertically aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes.
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.
Mizuno
Kohei
K
Research Center for Advanced Carbon Materials, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8565, Japan.
Ishii
Juntaro
J
Kishida
Hideo
H
Hayamizu
Yuhei
Y
Yasuda
Satoshi
S
Futaba
Don N
DN
Yumura
Motoo
M
Hata
Kenji
K