IMSC 2026 in Lyon

At the end of August, I travelled to Lyon for the 2026 International Mass Spectrometry Conference (IMSC). This was my first IMSC, although I had previously attended the French Mass Spectrometry Days. With around 1,500 participants, the conference brought together a particularly large international community. It was an opportunity to present a poster on our ongoing work at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research: the development of an electrospray ion beam deposition (ESIBD) platform designed to control the chemical state of mass-selected ions before deposition.

I should admit that I reused the poster made by Myriam Wadsack. The novel aspects include, in particular, a quadrupole trap chamber that will allow selected ions to interact with volatile molecules before deposition, and a nano-electrospray source designed to operate under controlled conditions. The goal is to prepare and then image, by scanning probe microscopy, molecular species in defined solvation or complexation states.

The conference was both substantial and friendly. Alexander Makarov of Thermo Fisher Scientific (the inventor of the Orbitrap) announced that Thermo Fisher is preparing to commercialise an instrument combining ESIBD and cryo-EM, following the line of work developed by Stephan Rauschenbach. Industry is now taking on soft-landing science with the resources at its disposal. To be continued.