liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS)

LC-MS is a hyphenated technique in which a liquid chromatograph is coupled with a mass spectrometric analyzer. For coupling the LC operated at atmospheric pressure with the high vacuum mass analyzer a lot of different interfaces have been designed ranging from moving belt over continuous-flow FAB, frit-FAB to ESI and APCI, with ESI and APCI being the most successful interfaces.