Quantum state preparation for trapped-ion qubits often relies on high-quality circularly polarized light, which may be difficult to achieve with chip-based integrated optics technology. We propose and implement a hybrid optical and microwave scheme for intermediate-field hyperfine qubits which instead relies on frequency selectivity. Experimentally, we achieve $99.94\%$ fidelity for linearly polarized $({\sigma }^{+}/{\sigma }^{-})$ light, using ${}^{43}\mathrm{Ca}^{+}$ at 28.8 mT. We find that the fidelity remains above $99.8\%$ for a mixture of all polarizations $({\sigma }^{+}/{\sigma }^{-}/\pi )$. We calculate that the method is capable of $99.99\%$ fidelity in ${}^{43}\mathrm{Ca}^{+}$, and even higher fidelities in heavier ions such as ${}^{\text{137}}\mathrm{Ba}^{+}$.

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• Optical pumping
• Quantum computation
• Quantum information with trapped ions
• Trapped ions