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It is shown that a vortex can be continuously created in a Bose-Einstein condensate with hyperfine spin F=2 in a Ioffe-Pritchard trap by reversing the axial magnetic field adiabatically. It may be speculated that the condensate cannot be confined in the trap since the weak-field seeking state makes transitions to the neutral and the strong-field seeking states due to the degeneracy of these states along the vortex axis when the axial field vanishes. We have solved the Gross-Pitaevskii equation numerically with given external magnetic fields to show that this is not the case. It is shown that a considerable fraction of the condensate remains in the trap even when the axial field is reversed rather slowly. This scenario is also analysed in the presence of an optical plug along the vortex axis. Then the condensate remains within the $F_z=2$ manifold, with respect to the local magnetic field, throughout the formation of a vortex and hence the loss of atoms does not take place., Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures

It has been shown that a vortex in a BEC with spin degrees of freedom can be created by manipulating with external magnetic fields. In the previous work, 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., Comment: 8 pages, 11 figures