Comment on "Laser cooling of $^{173}$Yb for isotope separation and precision hyperfine spectroscopy"

TL;DR

This paper reports new measurements of hyperfine splitting in Yb-173 that challenge previous results, identifying errors in earlier work and using optical frequency combs for improved accuracy.

Contribution

It provides corrected hyperfine splitting data for Yb-173 and highlights issues in prior measurements due to optical pumping and line center determination.

Findings

Discrepancies with previous hyperfine measurements.

Identification of errors in earlier optical pumping methods.

Use of optical frequency combs for precise spectroscopy.

Abstract

We present measurements of the hyperfine splitting in the Yb-173 $6s6p~^1P_1^{\rm o} (F^{\prime}=3/2,7/2)$ states that disagree significantly with those measured previously by Das and Natarajan [Phys. Rev. A 76, 062505 (2007)]. We point out inconsistencies in their measurements and suggest that their error is due to optical pumping and improper determination of the atomic line center. Our measurements are made using an optical frequency comb. We use an optical pumping scheme to improve the signal-to-background ratio for the $F^{\prime}=3/2$ component.