Static Charge & Samples: Exploding Limits

[gareth]

Hi,
How much static charge can you practically impart on a sample before it changes structurally or explodes completely?

e.g. if you had a gold sample of 1cm^3, and you wanted to give each atom an extra electron via elctrostatic charging, would the repulsion of these like forces be too great and destroy the material. In practice what would be achievable in this scenario, 1 extra conduction electron per 1 atom, 1 extra to 1 million atoms etc?

Thanks for the help

 

[cesiumfrog]

How strongly is gold held together? It's fairly straight forward to calculate the repulsive force due to excess electrostatic charge, so you need to know the attractive force. You could estimate that by looking up tensile strength (combined with the atomic density).