Method to create a vortex in a Bose-Einstein condensate -: art. no. 013617

It has been shown that a vortex in a Bose-Einstein condensate with spin degrees of freedom can be created by manipulating with external magnetic fields. In the previous work [Phys. Rev. A 61, 063610 (2000)] an optical plug along the vortex axis has been introduced to avoid Majorana flips, which take place when the external magnetic field vanishes along the vortex axis while it is created. In the present work, in contrast, we study the same scenario without introducing the optical plug. The magnetic field vanishes only in the center of the vortex at a certain moment of the evolution and hence we expect that the system will lose only a fraction of the atoms by Majorana flips even in the absence of an optical plug. Our conjecture is justified by numerically solving the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, where the full spinor degrees of freedom of the order parameter are properly taken into account. A significant simplification of the experimental realization of the scenario is attained by the omission of the optical plug.