A novel and ultrasensitive chiral detector for high-performance liquid chromatography has been developed. This detector is based on the measurement of circular dichroism of chiral effluents by the thermal lens effect. In this instrument, the chromatographic effluent was sequentially excited by left circularly polarized laser light (LCPL) and right circularly polarized laser light (RCPL); both of these excitation beams were derived from the same argon ion laser whose linearly polarized output was transformed into circularly polarized light by means of a Pockels cell. The heat generated as a consequence of the sample absorption of the LCPL and RCPL was measured by the probe laser beam collinearly overlapping with the two excitation beams. A lock-in amplifier was used to measure the thermal lens-circular dichroism (TL-CD) signal which corresponds to the difference in the thermal lens signals produced by the LCPL and RCPL excitation beams. In addition to its high sensitivity, the advantages of this TL-CD chiral detector include its ability to provide, directly and in real time, information on the chirality (i.e., circular dichroism) and optical purity of chiral samples. A detection limit of 7.2 ng was achieved for (-)-tris(ethylenediamine)cobalt(III) (k' = 0.45) as well as for the (+)-tris(ethylenediamine)cobalt(III) (k' = 1.40) when these two enantiomers were chromatographically separated from the corresponding racemic mixture through the use of bis(mu-d-tartrato)diantiomonate(III) ion pair reversed-phase chromatography. This limit of detection was found by using a 10-microL flow cell and having 5-mm path length and 6-mW excitation laser beam (lambda = 514.5 nm) modulated at 2 Hz.