  Landau damping and Bernstein-Greene-Kruskal (BGK) modes are among the most
fundamental concepts in plasma physics. While the former describes the
surprising damping of linear plasma waves in a collisionless plasma, the latter
describes exact undamped nonlinear solutions of the Vlasov equation. There does
exist a relationship between the two: Landau damping can be described as the
phase-mixing of undamped eigenmodes, the so-called Case-Van Kampen modes, which
can be viewed as BGK modes in the linear limit. While these concepts have been
around for a long time, unexpected new results are still being discovered. For
Landau damping, we show that the textbook picture of phase-mixing is altered
profoundly in the presence of collision. In particular, the continuous spectrum
of Case-Van Kampen modes is eliminated and replaced by a discrete spectrum,
even in the limit of zero collision. Furthermore, we show that these discrete
eigenmodes form a complete set of solutions. Landau-damped solutions are then
recovered as true eigenmodes (which they are not in the collisionless theory).
For BGK modes, our interest is motivated by recent discoveries of electrostatic
solitary waves in magnetospheric plasmas. While one-dimensional BGK theory is
quite mature, there appear to be no exact three-dimensional solutions in the
literature (except for the limiting case when the magnetic field is
sufficiently strong so that one can apply the guiding-center approximation). We
show, in fact, that two- and three-dimensional solutions that depend only on
energy do not exist. However, if solutions depend on both energy and angular
momentum, we can construct exact three-dimensional solutions for the
unmagnetized case, and two-dimensional solutions for the case with a finite
magnetic field. The latter are shown to be exact, fully electromagnetic
solutions of the steady-state Vlasov-Poisson-Amp\`ere system.
