High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Capillary electrophoresis (CE), also known as capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE), can be used to separate ionic species by their charge and frictional forces and hydrodynamic radius. In traditional electrophoresis, electrically charged analytes move in a conductive liquid medium under the influence of an electric field. Introduced in the 1960s, the technique of capillary electrophoresis (CE) was designed to separate species based on their size to charge ratio in the interior of a small capillary filled with an electrolyte.