ABSTRACT
The need to employ ancillary techniques, to confirm the identity of peaks eluted from a column, was recognized early in the development of chromatography. It was soon found, however, that the process of collecting and transferring a sample of the column eluent, containing a solute peak to an appropriate spectrometer, was tedious, clumsy, and often very inefficient. As a result, the concept of connecting the chromatograph directly to an appropriate spectrometer, to eliminate the tedious manual solute transfer, was developed. Various interfacing techniques have been explored for directly coupling the liquid chromatograph with a spectrometer. Today, the mass spectrometer, infrared (IR) spectrometer, the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer, and the atomic emission (AE) spectrometer, all have been combined with the liquid chromatograph (LC) with varying degrees of success. It would appear that the mass spectrometer (MS) has emerged as the most useful ancillary technique to LC for structure elucidation and solute identification. Consequently, in this limited treatment of tandem systems the LC-MS combination of instruments will receive greater emphasis.
