Liquid chromatography is an instrumental technique for separating components of a mixture based upon their relative affinities for a liquid mobile phase and the solid stationary phase of a liquid chromatography column. As this technique requires only that the sample be soluble, it is often used for non-volatile analytes. It is frequently used in the analysis of environmental, biological, and pharmaceutical samples.
LC may be combined with a number of different detectors. Most common are ultraviolet-visible, fluorescence, and mass spectrometric detectors.