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Scientists create metamaterial that can absorb light completely and turn it into heat
- gills 18y agoThis is cool. Anything that will help us convert light (particularly from the sun) into a more directly usable form of energy should be a good thing.
- swombat 18y agoFunny, and there I was thinking most people were trying to figure out ways to convert (waste) heat into something useful. Heat's not that incredibly useful. Particularly when you consider that, according to black body radiation laws, a body will emit exactly as much as it absorbs. So, this might be useful to get an object to reach room temperature really quickly.
- hugh 18y agoMinor nitpick: it's not true that "a body will emit exactly as much as it absorbs" in general. That's only true once it reaches some equilibrium temperature, which may not be room temperature. If you stick a room-temperature metal sheet outside on a sunny day, it will heat up until it reaches a steady state where the rate of heat absorption is equal to the rate of heat dissipation -- this can be significantly higher than room temperature, which is why pieces of metal outside on a hot day are really really hot.
- gills 18y agoThe steam engine and Otto cycle both convert waste heat to kinetic energy. They turned out to be marginally useful. I wasn't suggesting coating objects with an expensive material to collect ambient infrared radiation. I was thinking of solar or solar thermal power, since the article advertises the material as 'tunable black'.
- davidw 18y agoOh, oh, I know this one! I learned this as a kid with a magnifying glass. "Ants"
- hugh 18y agoLet me start by getting the "none more black" joke out of the way. Anyway, this is kinda neat (though I'm skeptical that it's really 100% absorption) but not really all that useful for anything, as far as I can tell. There aren't many applications where the difference between absorbing 99.9% of the light and 99.99999999999999999% of the light is a particularly big deal, as far as I know.
- jws 18y agoIt only absorbs over a narrow, tunable, frequency range. That won't make it black. Personally I was disappointed when I saw they could take a picture of it.
- hugh 18y agoOh, I had assumed that was an electron micrograph. But you're right, now I come to read the article again it only works over a narrow frequency range.
- manny 18y agoOne step closer to creating a Dyson Sphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere)!!
- devicenull 18y agoNow if only we could completely turn heat into light. Wouldn't that make for a interesting heatsink on a computer? I forsee: Oh man, my computer is too bright