Racemic mixture

In chemistry, a racemic mixture, or racemate /reɪˈsimeɪt/, is one that has equal amounts of left- and right-handed enantiomers of a chiral molecule. The first known racemic mixture was racemic acid, which Louis Pasteur found to be a mixture of the two enantiomeric isomers of tartaric acid. A mixture with only a single enantiomer is an enantiomerically pure or enantiopure mixture.