Abstract

We have studied the persistent flow of a spinor condensate in an all-optical ring trap.  After initially rotating the atoms, we have observed high-charge vortices persist in pure spin states for long times (>100s) and decay stochastically in a quantized fashion.  These decay events correspond to the occurrence of 2p phase slips in the condensate.  By adding a second spin component, we are able to study how the addition of a spin degree of freedom affects the stability of the superflow.  I will discuss these studies, in which we observe that the existence a second spin component drastically reduces the lifetime of the persistent flow.