Editing Black body (section)

=== Near-black materials ===
There is interest in blackbody-like materials for [[camouflage]] and [[radiation-absorbent material]]s for radar invisibility.<ref name=Lewis/><ref name=Quinn/> They also have application as solar energy collectors, and infrared thermal detectors. As a perfect emitter of radiation, a hot material with black body behavior would create an efficient infrared heater, particularly in space or in a vacuum where convective heating is unavailable.<ref name=Mizuno/> They are also useful in telescopes and cameras as anti-reflection surfaces to reduce stray light, and to gather information about objects in high-contrast areas (for example, observation of planets in orbit around their stars), where blackbody-like materials absorb light that comes from the wrong sources.

It has long been known that a [[carbon black]] coating will make a body nearly [[black]]. An improvement on lamp-black is found in manufactured [[carbon nanotube]]s. Nano-porous materials can achieve [[Refractive index|refractive indices]] nearly that of vacuum, in one case obtaining average reflectance of 0.045%.<ref name=Chun/><ref name=Yang/> In 2009, a team of Japanese scientists created a material called nanoblack which is close to an ideal black body, based on vertically aligned single-walled [[carbon nanotube]]s. This absorbs between 98% and 99% of the incoming light in the spectral range from the ultra-violet to the far-infrared regions.<ref name=Mizuno/>

Other examples of nearly perfect black materials are [[super black]], prepared by chemically etching a [[nickel]]–[[phosphorus]] [[alloy]],<ref name=Brown/> [[vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays]] (like [[Vantablack]]) and flower carbon nanostructures;<ref>{{Cite journal |doi = 10.1021/acsanm.9b01950|title = Dandelion-Like Carbon Nanotubes for Near-Perfect Black Surfaces|year = 2019|last1 = Ghai|first1 = Viney|last2 = Singh|first2 = Harpreet|last3 = Agnihotri|first3 = Prabhat K.|journal = ACS Applied Nano Materials|volume = 2|issue = 12|pages = 7951–7956| s2cid=213017898 }}</ref> all absorb 99.9% of light or more.