  We have created a Bose-Einstein condensate whose spin orientation is
metastable. Condensates were transferred into a quadrupole magnetic trap, where
Majorana transitions limited the lifetime to a few hundred milliseconds, about
30 times the trapping period. Atoms held in the trap frequently displayed a
ring-shaped time-of-flight distribution. We speculate that such a ring could be
either a quantized vortex or a feature of the Majorana loss dynamics in the
quantum regime.
