1. Gas chromatography/mass spectrometry

Capillary column gas chromatography (GC) is a powerful separation method. This technique is the subject of a special article in this treatise .

Compared with liquid chromatography, GC achieves high efficiencies (several hundred thousand theoretical plateaus) with reasonable analysis times, mainly thanks to the high diffusion coefficients of solutes in gases (around 100,000 times greater than in liquids). Combining this separation technique with a highly sensitive detection technique such as mass spectrometry (MS) enables molecular identification with very low detection thresholds, of the order of a few nanograms for each of the constituents to be identified, in order...