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 A Black Hole of Carbon Nanotubes for Defence to Energy Harvesting
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  Mr. Viney Ghai*
Email: viney.ghai@iitrpr.ac.in
Have you ever imagined how a magician tricks you with his cloak or how Mr India goes invisible in the movie? This
might have fascinated you in childhood and developed a deep urge to understand the phenomenon. Well, the answer to all these speculations lies in a word “Light”. The light can be absorbed, transmitted, reflected or refracted depending on the medium of travel and interaction with the striking surface. In order to make a body fully or partially invisible to a system, or to confuse the body can absorb all the light, which is falling on its surface. Such a body is called a black body. It is almost impossible to find the exact shape, size and features in a black body (as shown in the fig.). This leads to passive camouflage, which ultimately causes confusion to the observer.
Depending upon the desired application, materials can be engineered to behave as a system that works for a particular range of electromagnetic spectrum of light.
Can we think of a material in which the light enters and experiences multiple internal reflections within its surface and is unlikely to reflect making the material to be a nearly perfect black absorber. Following this thought process, author under the supervision of Prof. Harpreet Singh and Dr P.K. Agnihotri at IIT Ropar has developed a flexible nanocomposite comprising carbon nanotubes (CNTs), ZnO nanorods and Fe nanoparticles, which absorbs more than 99.3% of the incident light falling on it in the ultraviolet, visible and near infrared (UV- Vis-NIR) range of electromagnetic spectrum and behaves as a near-perfect absorber of
 * Mr. Viney Ghai, PhD Scholar from Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, is pursuing his research on “LightHarvesting Materials”. His popular science story entitled “A Black Hole of Carbon Nanotubes for Defence to Energy Harvesting” has been selected for AWSAR Award.


























































































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