  We examine a scheme for the optical creation of a superfluid vortex in a
trapped Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), using the stimulated Raman adiabatic
passage (STIRAP) technique. By exposing an oblate, axis-symmetric condensate to
two co-propagating laser pulses, one can transfer external angular momentum
from the light field to the matter wave, if one of the beams is the fundamental
Gaussian mode and the other is a Gauss-Laguerre mode of angular momentum
$1\hbar$. We demonstrate the complete transfer efficiency by numerical
integration of the multi-component Gross-Pitaevskii equation and explain the
results with an intuitive and accurate approximation within the Thomas-Fermi
limit. In addition, we discuss residual excitations (breathing modes) which
occur in the two-dimensional regime and present the Bogoliubov excitation
spectrum.
