Question: why does a electron microscope cost £2.6 million, as that is quite expensive?

Kerry O'Shea answered on 17 Nov 2014:

An electron microscope is a very complicated piece of equipment, which is why it’s so expensive. It’s not really like a normal microscope that uses light because we can’t see electrons. We also can’t use glass lenses to focus them as we do in light microscopes.

The signals we get can tell us a lot about the material we’re interested in – the microscope also has an X-ray detector to analyse X-rays that are produced by the sample. It also has something called a spectrometer which allows us to study the electrons that have lost energy, which tells us about the atoms the electrons have hit. There are a number of different detectors which we can use to get different information about the sample. All of these extras bring the price up a bit.