ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the general conditions under which the electric dipole electromagnetic field interaction may be used to attain selective control over the population of a desired enantiomer. Selecting a desired enantiomer from a racemic mixture, and, more ambitiously, converting a racemic mixture to the desired enantiomer using optical means have been the foci of great fascination. The prochiral molecule is not chiral because it possesses a hyperplane of symmetry, denoted as, which is the set of points of equal BA and A B' distances. The chapter describes the cyclic population transfer method for achieving enantioselectivity. The great advantage of the method is that it leads to the separation of a racemic mixture to two enantiomers by the application of only three laser pulses.
