The Wint-O-Green Life Saver Effect, long of interest to children and adults chewing the candies in pitch-black closets to see the blue-white sparks shooting out of their mouths, could provide scientists a way to better understand how things break. At the atomic level, that is.

Last month, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reported in The Journal of the American Chemical Society that those faint sparks were energetic enough to power chemical reactions along the fracturing surfaces.

“When you break a pencil, you actually have to have broken chemical bonds,” said Kenneth S. Suslick, a professor of chemistry at Illinois and one of the paper’s authors. “Yet our understanding of that process is surprisingly poor. In fact when you look at the quantum mechanics of that, it isn’t exactly clear how breakage occurs.”

Dr. Suslick said the sparks of light gave the opportunity to do spectroscopy, looking for specific colors of light given off by different atoms and molecules. That will give the scientists hints about how the bonds between atoms rearrange. “When you break materials, you’re almost always going to be driving chemical reactions,” he said. “It gives us a spectroscopic probe to see what’s going on right at the fracture point.”