We study the energetic and dynamic stability of coreless vortices in nonrotated spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates, trapped with a three-dimensional optical potential and a Ioffe-Pritchard field. The stability of stationary vortex states is investigate
d by solving the corresponding Bogoliubov equations. We show that the quasiparticle excitations corresponding to axisymmetric stationary states can be taken to be eigenstates of angular momentum in the axial direction. Our results show that coreless vortex states can occur as local or global minima of the condensate energy or become energetically or dynamically unstable depending on the parameters of the Ioffe-Pritchard field. The experimentally most relevant coreless vortex state containing a doubly quantized vortex in one of the hyperfine spin components turned out to have very non-trivial stability regions, and especially a quasiperiodic dynamic instability region which corresponds to splitting of the doubly quantized vortex.
