Re: What happens to the two extra electrons in an alpha decay process?

I understand that during an alpha decay an atom loses a helium nucleus and becomes an atom of a new element. What happens to the two electrons that would have been associated with the helium atom? Does the atom of the new element now have a negative two charge or does something else happen to these electrons?

Electrons are not exactly static charged particles. They have a good deal of fluidity in practice, and in fact one could go as far as saying that they are inherently fuzzy objects, like a photon of light. In most solids (and even in gases) any non-equilibrium electronic state is almost instantaneously readjusted. It's rearrangements of atomic nucleii which take time (so that, while chemical reactions technically involve only electrons, any reaction which requires movement of whole atoms will have a measurable rate).

Please note that I am not slighting the Marcus theory (see also here) of electron-transfer, and electron-transfer reactions do have measurable rates, but the energy differences involved are lower. Besides, Marcus pointed out that electron transfer requires molecular distortion, which involves moving nucleii...

Essentially what happens in a-decay is that the a-particle knocks electrons loose from one or more nearby atoms, then picks up two of the loose electrons to form a neutral helium atom. Meanwhile, the other surrounding atoms (including the "dianion" parent atom -- the scare quotes are deliberate) very quickly reshuffle their electrons in order to have the most energetically stable configuration. This reshuffling energy, by the way, shows up as heat; strong a-emitters like radium are typically a little warmer than their surroundings, and radioactive decay is a prime source of the earth's internal heat.

My doctoral advisor, among others, has studied very reactive chemical species by using radioactive decay to transform one element into another (he was interested in silicon atoms, so he used ³⁰P which undergoes ₊b-decay to become ³⁰Si). While the decay is energetic enough to break the chemical bonds in the ³⁰PH₃ molecules he used, so that he was observing the reactions of free silicon atoms, in no case did he observe ion-neutral reactions, even though the experiments were being carried out in the gas phase. This finding is general; ion-neutral reactions are only observed under high vacuum conditions; typically with molecular-beam techniques in the laboratory.