You can easily replicate the colored light produced from grinding, cleaving, biting, or scratching a crystal at home with a hammer and some Life Savers. The flash of light results from a static electric discharge from fracturing the sugar crystal.
The friction of the hammer on the sugar crystals excites the nitrogen air molecules. Chemical bonds in the sugar molecules are broken, providing energy for the electrons in some of the atoms to actually jump around and form positively charged nitrogen ions, which produce a blue or green luminescence. Think: salt or diamond Scientists believe that the structure of a crystal determines whether or not it will emit light when broken, a phenomenon dubbed triboluminescence.
This second class includes sugar. When you break a sugar crystal, one half of the crystal ends up with more electrons than the other. The electrons leap across the gap to the more positively charged side. In your mouth, these jumping electrons crash into nitrogen atoms, which is abundant in the air. The nitrogen briefly absorbs the energy from the collision and then spits out some energy — in the form of ultraviolet light. So far, all of this could happen with many hard, sugary candies.
What bumps certain sweet suckers into the world of blue, visible lightning is their flavoring. Transparent candy or candy made using artificial sweeteners will not work. Most adhesive tapes also emit light when they have ripped away. Amblygonite, calcite, feldspar, fluorite, lepidolite, mica, pectolite, quartz, and sphalerite are all minerals known to exhibit triboluminescence when struck, rubbed, or scratched.
Triboluminescence varies widely from one mineral sample to another, such that it might be unobservable. Sphalerite and quartz specimens that are translucent rather than transparent, with small fractures throughout the rock, are the most reliable.
There are several ways to observe triboluminescence at home. As I have mentioned, if you have wintergreen-flavored Lifesavers handy, get in a very dark room and crush the candy with pliers or a mortar and pestle. Chewing the candy while watching yourself in a mirror will work, but the moisture from saliva will lessen or eliminate the effect. Rubbing two sugar cubes or pieces of quartz or rose quartz in the dark will also work.
Scratching quartz with a steel pin may also demonstrate the effect. For the most part, triboluminescence is an interesting effect with few practical applications.
However, understanding its mechanisms may help explain other types of luminescence, including bioluminescence in bacteria and earthquake lights. Triboluminescent coatings could be used in remote sensing applications to signal mechanical failure. One reference states that research is underway to apply triboluminescent flashes to sense automobile crashes and inflate airbags.
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Measure ad performance. Methyl salicylate , or oil of wintergreen, is fluorescent , meaning it absorbs light of a shorter wavelength and then emits it as light of a longer wavelength. Ultraviolet light has a shorter wavelength than visible light. So when a Wint-O-Green Life Saver is crushed between your teeth, the methyl salicylate molecules absorb the ultraviolet, shorter wavelength light produced by the excited nitrogen, and re-emit it as light of the visible spectrum, specifically as blue light -- thus the blue sparks that jump out of your mouth when you crunch on a Wint-O-Green Life Saver.
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