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The use of plasmas provides a way to overcome the damage threshold of classical solid-state based optical materials which is the main limitation encountered in producing extreme power laser pulses. In particular one can use plasmas to directly amplify ultra-short laser pulses to very high intensities. Multi-dimensional kinetic simulations and first proof-of-principle experiments show the feasibility of using plasma instabilities involving ion waves, such as stimulated Brillouin backscattering, in a controlled way to transfer energy from a long pump pulse to a short seed pulse and thereby increase the intensity of the latter. Plasma parametric amplification, and the use of plasma mirrors for focusing, is part of the newly developping domain of plasma optics, which eventually will pave the way to Exawatt lasers.

The interaction of a whistler soliton with a nonrelativistic electron beam streaming along the external magnetic field is considered. Our results are applied to the solar wind.

Monopole vortices, obeying the homogeneous Hasegawa-Mima equation or the convective cell equation in magnetized plasmas are considered. It is shown that two-dimensional perturbations of single vortices in the plane perpendicular to the external magnetic field do not grow in time. It is also argued that three-dimensional perturbations will not lead to an instability of monopoles.