一种“比黑更黑”的颜色诞生，连光都能吞噬

一直以来，黑就是最深的颜色。不过最近，麻省理工宣布，他们发现了一种“比黑更黑”的颜色，取名为“超黑”。它是一种高科技的应用材料，颜色“超黑”，可用来作为高效的光捕获装置。超黑是如何发现的？它的发现，有什么意义？一起来听今天的讲解。

本篇课程首发于2019年12月21日

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Ultra-Black Is the New Black
By Natalie Angier
① On a laboratory bench at the National Institute of Standards and Technology was a square tray with two black disks inside, each about the width of the top of a Dixie cup. Both disks were undeniably black, yet they didn’t look quite the same.
② The first black disk was a roundel of engineered carbon now more than a decade old.
③ Disk number two was an example of advanced ultra-black technology: elaborately engineered arrays of tiny carbon cylinders, or nanotubes, designed to capture and muzzle any light they encounter.
④ Blacker is the new black, and researchers here and abroad are working to create ever more efficient light traps, which means fabricating materials that look ever darker, ever flatter, ever more ripped from the void.
⑤ The N.I.S.T. ultra-black absorbs at least 99.99 percent of the light that stumbles into its nanotube forest. But scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported in September the creation of a carbon nanotube coating that they claim captures better than 99.995 of the incident light.
⑥ It’s not a mere ego-driven dance of the decimal point. The more fastidious and reliable the ultra-black, the more broadly useful it will prove to be — in solar power generators, radiometers, industrial baffles and telescopes primed to detect the faintest light fluxes as a distant planet traverses the face of its star.