  A vortex can tunnel between two pinning potentials in an atomic Bose-Einstein
condensate on a time scale of the order of 1s under typical experimental
conditions. This makes it possible to detect the tunneling experimentally. We
calculate the tunneling rate by phenomenologically treating vortices as
point-like charged particles moving in an inhomogeneous magnetic field. The
obtained results are in close agreement with numerical simulations based on the
stochastic c-field theory.
