Simultaneous preparation of two initial clock states in a thulium optical clock

Because of the low sensitivity of a thulium optical clock to black-body radiation and good accuracy and stability estimations, it is considered as a promising transportable optical clock. One of the leading systematic effects for Tm clock transition, i.e., the second-order Zeeman effect, can be canceled by probing two clock transitions between different hyperfine levels of ground and metastable states during clock operation. Herein, we demonstrate efficient optical pumping into the mF=0 state of both ground hyperfine levels using single-frequency radiation at 418.8 nm. We prepared the atoms in both target states simultaneously and excited two clock transitions alternately. The resulting population of mF=0 states of ground hyperfine levels was 36% and 3.8% of the initial number of atoms with less than 4% and 0.4% on nonzero magnetic sublevels, respectively. We performed numerical simulations of the optical pumping process, which is able to explain experimental results well.