Why no gamma ray microscope?

It seems to me that such a device would be capable of higher magnification than what we are actually capable of.
Is the limiting issue that we simply cannot focus such high energy light?

Why do you think they’d be capable of higher magnification?

In any case, gamma-rays are too penetrative to focus in any meaningful way (they just go through any mirror or glass) and even if focused, you need a really big thick detector to capture them. And then, of course, there would also be the problem of their just going through whatever your trying to look at.

The wacelength ranges of x-rays and gamma rays overlap (the distinction isn’t really so much the wavelength as the way they are generated). we certainly have ways of focusing them – grazing incidence paraboloids and chains of drilled-out holes in metal forming sequential lenses. It’s more limited and cruder than focusing UV, Visible, or infrared light, though.
But the real reason, I suspect, is that we already have electron microscopes, which have much higher resolution than gamma ray microscopes would have, and easier focusing using electric fields.

Because the smallest features you can resolve with light (or any other wave) are comparable in size to the wavelength. But yeah, the problem is that it’s really hard to focus them, and electron microscopes work just fine (they have their limitations, but a gamma microscope would probably have much the same limitations).

Interesting factiod. Holograms were invented by whathisname? to make electron microscopes work better. He got the Nobel for it years later.

Dennis Gabor.

Details? They taught me you can’t focus x-rays.

Methods have been found to focus x-rays (X-ray focussing elements)

A bit of googling reveals the webpage of a German lab that’s working on x-ray lenses for microscopy. As they put it, “in the case of X-rays, considerable focusing can only be achieved by stacking a large number of strongly curved lenses behind one another.” The resulting lenses are extremely intricate on a microscopic level, to the point where they can’t be easily manufactured.

Back to the OP’s point, there are a lot of clever illumination, imaging, and data processing techniques that allow for the resolution of sub-wavelength features. Collectively, this is referred to “super-resolution microscopy”.

However I’m sure that there are plenty of people that could find a use for an x-ray microscope if it was ever practical.

The people that make integrated circuits do many steps by projecting images of part layouts onto the chip surface coated with photoresist, which is then etched away in some areas and not others depending on where the light hit it. They then carry out operations that the photoresist blocks where it remains.
Photolithography with radiation around the 10 nm border between X-Rays and ultraviolet is now being worked on. I’m pretty clueless how they do it, whether it’s grazing incidence mirrors or what. But a lens that can do photolithography when the radiation goes in one direction is also a microscope objective when the radiation is sent the other way.

It should also be noted that high-energy optics are easier (still not easy in an absolute sense, but easier) when you’re dealing with monochromatic light of a known wavelength, since you can put on coatings optimized for reflection at that wavelength. This is probably one of the things they do in photolithography.

No, no, it was thingy.

As far as I know, EUV lithography is usually done with normal-incidence multilayer mirrors. It’s the same technology used on some astronomical instruments, like the Solar Dynamics Observatory. As Chronos said, it does help to use monochromatic light; multilayer optics are tuned to a specific wavelength.

There are EUV microscope that use the technology as well, but I don’t think the resolution is anywhere near as good as electron microscopes.

Did you not read my post? I listed several methods. anaglyph linkeed to a page with fuller descriptions, but you could have entered the names I gave in any search engine.