Polyimide removal, cleaving, and fusion splicing of cylindrical and square fused silica capillaries for new separation and detection layouts in capillary electrophoresis and chromatography.

Fusion splicing is an already mature technology used to join the ends of optical fibers in the telecommunication industry. However, there is a lack of reliable and well-described protocols to join the ends of fused silica microtubes or capillaries using fusion splicing. In this work, a step-by-step procedure is proposed and demonstrated to find the optimal operation conditions to splice the ends of fused silica capillaries by fusion.