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