Perfect blackbody radiation from a graphene nanostructure with application to high-temperature spectral emissivity measurements

We report the successful fabrication of a novel type of blackbody material based on a graphene nanostructure. We demonstrate that the graphene nanostructure not only shows a low reflectance comparable to that of a carbon nanotube array but also shows an extremely high heat resistance at temperatures greater than 2500 K. The graphene nanostructure, which has an emissivity higher than 0.99 over a wide range of wavelengths, behaves as a standard blackbody material; therefore, the radiation spectrum and the temperature can be precisely measured in a simple manner. Here, the spectral emissivities of tungsten and tantalum are experimentally obtained using this ideal blackbody material and are compared to previously reported spectra. We clearly demonstrate the existence of a temperature-independent fixed point of emissivity at a certain wavelength. Both the spectral emissivity as a function of temperature and the cross-over point in the emissivity spectrum are well described by the complex dielectric function based on the Lorentz-Drude model with the phonon-scattering effect. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America