A user can create a persistent volume claim to use a previously created Persistent volumes. A claim should include the access mode and a storage capacity to request.
The relation between claim and volume is always one-to-one, so once there is a binding, the volume is not available unless the claim is gone.
When the claim is deleted. Is also possible to decide what happens to the persistent volume. By default the policy is to Retain the volume but can be also Delete or Recycle by another claim.
Kubernetes always tries to bind the best match between claims and volumes. But is also possible to manually select the binding using selectors.