Light 14: Piezoluminescence

By Circe -

Welcome to the 2023 Advent Calendar, which this year is just a list of things that light up all pretty. Previous entries are here. If you enjoy this and want to encourage me to bang more things out on a keyboard, consider supporting my Patreon, or sending something off of my Christmas list. If you'd rather support my spoiled pets, their Ratmas list is here. If you want to spend money but not on me, you can direct your donations to Mainely Rat Rescue, who handles rescue and foster operations for rats, mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, and other small mammals in the New England area, or the MSPCA, where my critters got their medical care before I found a good exotics vet, and where I picked up Koda and Yogi. 

Enjoy your trip through the cavalcade of things that go blinky-blink in the dark!

A rat investigation a large pink crystal.

You can get light out of crystals by squishing them.

Well, some crystals. And not usually much light. But it still works!

You may have heard of the piezoelectric effect, where certain crystals generate current when pressure is applied. Applications are pretty wide; sound is a pressure wave in air, for one thing, so this is useful for motion detectors that are triggered by noise. Other uses are generally for teeny-tiny things that need very small currents and great precision, like triggering the nozzles on inkjet printers. 

The piezoluminescent effect is the same deal, only instead of electrons, the pressure knocks photons loose instead. It's not seen as much in consumer technology, especially since getting all the extra knockable photons into manufactured crystals hard enough to be useful in the first place tends to involve irradiating them. Natural crystals, on the other hand, are sometimes perfect for the job for reasons beyond human efforts, and piezoluminescence may be at least partially responsible for earthquake lights.

More fun is a sub-phenomenon called triboluminescence, which is piezoluminescence over an extremely short time span, i.e., smashing, grinding, or ripping a substance instead of smoothly squishing it. Lots of things triboluminesce. You can get a shower of sparks by rubbing some quartz-filled rocks together, peeling duct tape strips apart, grinding sugar in a blender, or taking a hammer to Wint-O-Green Life Savers. 

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