  Selective control of decoherence is demonstrated for a multilevel system by
generalizing the instantaneous phase of any chirped pulse as individual terms
of a Taylor series expansion. In the case of a simple two-level system, all odd
terms in the series lead to population inversion while the even terms lead to
self-induced transparency. These results also hold for multiphoton transitions
that do not have any lower-order photon resonance or any intermediate virtual
state dynamics within the laser pulse-width. Such results form the basis of a
robustly implementable CNOT gate.
