Elliptic vortices in self-attractive Bose-Einstein condensates

We report solutions for vortex solitons in an anisotropic harmonic trapping potential in a "pancake-shaped" Bose-Einstein condensate with attractive inter-atomic interactions. Elliptic vortices featuring anisotropic patterns bifurcate from dipole states that exist in the linear limit. The elliptic vortices with topological charge S = 1, featuring strongly asymmetric shapes, may be stable in a wide region in their existence domain. The dependence of the stability region on the eccentricity of the elliptic trap is reported. All higher-order vortices, with S > 1, are unstable.