Structure and Stability of Vortices in Dilute Bose-Einstein Condensates at Ultralow Temperatures

We compute the structure of a quantized vortex line in a harmonically trapped dilute atomic Bose-Einstein condensate using the Popov version of the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov mean-field theory. The vortex is shown to be (meta)stable in a nonrotating trap even in the zero-temperature limit, thus confirming that weak particle interactions induce for the condensed gas a fundamental property characterizing "classical" superfluids. We present the structure of the vortex at ultralow temperatures and discuss the crucial effect of the thermal gas component to its energetic stability.