  Recently thulium has been condensed to Bose-Einstein condensate. Machine
learning was used to avoid a detailed study of all obstacles making cooling
difficult. This paper analyses the atomic loss mechanism for the 532 nm optical
trap, used in the Bose-condensation experiment, and compares it with the
alternative and more traditional micron-range optical dipole trap. We also
measured the scalar and tensor polarizability of thulium at 1064 nm and was
found to be $167\pm 25$ a.u. ($275\pm 41\times {{10}^{-41}}\text{F }\cdot
\text{ }{{\text{m}}^{\text{2}}}$) and $-4\pm 1$ a.u. ($7\pm 2\times
{{10}^{-41}}\text{F }\cdot \text{ }{{\text{m}}^{\text{2}}}$).
