In one of Stanford’s labs, a roll of Scotch tape spins under a motorized roller. To the untrained eye, it’s an ordinary strip of office supplies. But to a group of chemists, that humble peel carries lightning — quite literally.
By peeling adhesive tape at just the right speed, researchers in China and the United States have generated electric fields intense enough to spark chemical reactions. The findings, recently reported by a team including physical chemist Richard Zare of Stanford University, suggest that this phenomenon, aptly nicknamed microlightning, could one day help drive greener chemical processes.
“It’s always been thought that you have to use a spark plug from a fuel-driven car or something,” Zare told Chemistry World, alluding to previous electrochemical replacements to energy-intensive traditional chemical synthesis processes.
This fresh look at a phenomenon known for decades could help reimagine how we power chemistry, from the lab bench to industrial-scale synthesis.
Tape, Sparks, and Chemistry
The idea that peeling tape can produce light isn’t new. Scientists first noticed it in 1939. And in 2008, physicist Seth Putterman and colleagues at UCLA revealed that rapidly unspooling adhesive tape could emit x-rays.
That glow comes from electric fields. As tape peels away, its sticky side becomes positively charged. If it separates quickly (faster than 0.3 meters per second), the field intensifies, potentially reaching a billion volts per meter. That’s strong enough to break down air molecules, releasing a pulse of energy like a tiny lightning bolt.
Zare and his collaborators, Xinxing Zhang at Nankai University and Tingting Zheng at East China Normal University, used a controlled roller to peel tape at precise speeds. They applied vibrational Stark spectroscopy to measure the field and mass spectrometry to analyze chemical outcomes.
The goal wasn’t just to confirm the spark — it was to see if it could do work.
What They Found
Their test case was the Menshutkin reaction, a classic organic transformation where pyridine reacts with methyl iodide. It’s a staple in drug development and industrial chemistry. And, remarkably, it worked.
The peeling tape created enough of a jolt to overcome the energy barrier of the reaction. No spark plug, no combustion engine — just tape and motion.
To be clear, Zare isn’t proposing we swap industrial reactors for tape dispensers. Instead, the aim is to show that interfacial electrical discharges — sparks formed at boundaries like air and solid, or water and gas — can serve as a source of activation energy.
That idea has broader potential. Zare told Chemistry World‘s Tim Wogan of another recent experiment, led by Yifan Meng at Nankai University, involving water microdroplets sprayed through alkyne vapors. The team observed the formation of carboxylic acids, suggesting that microlightning at droplet interfaces created ozone, which in turn cleaved tough carbon–carbon triple bonds.
The fact that such chemistry occurred under ambient conditions without high heat, pressure, or solvents hints at new possibilities for sustainable synthesis.
Could Microlightning Have Lit Life’s Fuse?
Zare suspects this process — microlightning at liquid and gas interfaces — may be very similar to chemistry from Earth’s early history.
“My own guess is it’s had historical purposes in maybe making the building blocks of life,” he said.
It’s a nod to theories that natural energy sources, like lightning or volcanic heat, helped drive the formation of amino acids and other key molecules in the prebiotic world. Zare even draws connections to the eerie flickers of will-o’-the-wisps above swamps, perhaps caused by electrical discharges from decaying matter and moist air.
In that light, what looks like a trick of static electricity could be a glimpse into the origins of life, and a beacon for future technologies.
