Taking all the electrons away from a real conductor

[FortranMan]

TL;DR

How many electrons can you remove from a solid substance before it breaks down at a chemical level?

How many electrons can you remove from a solid substance before it breaks down at a chemical level?

Thinking this through myself, you can create positively or negatively charged objects to a degree, especially with a metallic conductor that can tolerate a loss of charge at the cost of the entire conductor becoming slightly charged at its surface. However how long can we keep emptying a conductor of electrons? Will electrons in their valence band become excited and jump into the conductor band, allowing us to strip more electrons from the conductor? But as valence electrons are critical for determining the chemical behavior of elements, would this adversely affect the chemical bonds holding the conductor together? As a side question, how many electrons can you strip from a molecule like water before it chemically breaks down as there are no electrons available to form covalent bonds? Is this a complex question, too abstract, or is it easily studied experimentally by observing the dielectric breakdown strengths of different materials?

 

[mfb]

Long before you get chemical effects the charge will be so large that the material emits atoms from the surface, or the whole material explodes: A Coulomb explosion. This is routinely done with lasers.

 

[dRic2]

As a side question, how many electrons can you strip from a molecule like water before it chemically breaks down as there are no electrons available to form covalent bonds?

That depends on various factors like how you strip those electrons and the chemical surroundings.

An interesting curiosity: if you heavily ionize an atom you can actually influence some nuclear properties like the decay constant. For example, a stable isotope of K (potassium) was successfully forced to $\beta^{-}$-decay after full ionization in order to fill the first orbital.