  We demonstrate the coherent transfer of the orbital angular momentum of a
photon to an atom in quantized units of hbar, using a 2-photon stimulated Raman
process with Laguerre-Gaussian beams to generate an atomic vortex state in a
Bose-Einstein condensate of sodium atoms. We show that the process is coherent
by creating superpositions of different vortex states, where the relative phase
between the states is determined by the relative phases of the optical fields.
Furthermore, we create vortices of charge 2 by transferring to each atom the
orbital angular momentum of two photons.
