Mechanoluminescence event yields novel emissions, reactions

"You may, when in the dark frighten simple people only by chewing lumps of sugar, and, in the meantime, keeping your mouth open, which will appear to them as if full of fire," Father Giambattista Beccaria wrote in "A Treatise Upon Artificial Electricity," in 1753. Mechanoluminescence is the light generated when a crystal, such as sugar or quartz, is fractured by grinding, cleaving or via other mechanical means. Sir Francis Bacon wrote about this phenomenon as early as 1605.

Researchers at the University of Illinois report here extensive atomic and molecular spectral emission not previously seen in a mechanoluminescence event. The findings, which appear online this month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, also include the first report of gas phase chemical reactions resulting from a mechanoluminescence event.