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Woo-hoo – how’s that for making a short answer long?īefore you go on that all Wint-O-Green Lifesaver diet, you should know that methyl salicylate has a dirty little secret:it’s toxic. It then re-emits the light, thus delaying and increasing the effect. Other than providing the yummy mint flavor, methyl salicylate can absorb ultraviolet light. The Wint-O-Green variety of Lifesavers has the magic ingredient, methyl salicylate. That is what happens with the wimpy cherry Lifesavers that failed you or a sugar cube, for that matter.īut this is where it gets good. This creates some ultraviolet light but usually not enough to see. This can cause tiny sparks to hop around, which, in turn, excites nitrogen molecules in the air. When you crush sugar crystals, you are tearing apart chemical bonds, which creates fragments that are positively and negatively charged. The Lifesaver effect also is called triboluminescence, the creation of light by friction. This new route to producing mechanoluminescence will allow for more detailed studies, which may shed new light on this phenomenon.That’s one answer, but I just don’t send people away without at least one 50-cent word to make them feel superior to their friends. The ultrasonic waves occur 20,000 times a second, creating many high-speed collisions between solid particles, and that is why the glow is so much brighter than that produced by hand grinding. When these crystals collide with one another, they shatter into pieces, and that produces the mechanoluminescence as the fractured crystal surfaces pull apart and cause an electric discharge.
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The metal particles were replaced with brittle organic crystals such as sugar in these studies. These imploding bubbles form shock waves in the liquid, and Suslick previously has shown that these shock waves will drive suspended metal particles into one another at roughly half the speed of sound in the liquid.Īt such high velocities, the malleable metal particles melted together. These bubbles grow and contract with each sound wave and if conditions are just right, they can violently implode. If the ultrasound is loud enough, the liquid can be pulled apart transiently forming millions of bubbles, each with a diameter smaller than a shaft of hair. Ultrasound in a liquid, just like any sound waves, causes oscillation of expansion and compression of the liquid. The mechanoluminescence is much the same as lightning during a thunderstorm. The light is generated from a static electric discharge created when a crystal, such as sugar, is fractured. Eddingsaas at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have used high-intensity ultrasound in liquid slurries of sugar and other organic crystals to create mechanoluminescence up to 1,000 times more intense than from grinding. 9 issue of Nature, chemistry professor Kenneth S. Typically, mechanoluminescence is generated by simply grinding, cleaving, biting, or scratching a material, and this process produces a very dim light.Īs reported in the Nov. This phenomenon was first discovered in 1605 by Sir Francis Bacon, who observed light emission when scraping a lump of sugar with a knife. That light is called mechanoluminescence, also known as triboluminescence. Many people know that if you bite or break a Wint-O-Green Lifesaver in the dark, you will see a spark of green light. The second image is a photograph of the mechanoluminescence of N-acetylanthranilic acid crystals in the shape of the University of Illinois logo crushed between two transparent windows. The top image is a photograph of the mechanoluminescence of N-acetylanthranilic acid crystals crushed between two transparent windows. The phenomenon of mechanoluminescence was first discovered in 1605 by Sir Frances Bacon from scratching sugar with a knife.