Beam-like gravitational waves and their geodesics (Q1107151)

Exact solutions for the gravitational wave produced by an impulsive, massless beam of arbitrary energy profile are constructed in any number of spacetime dimensions. Geodesics can be explicitly computed and, for homogeneous, axisymmetric, finite-size beams, they focus exactly at the location of the curvature singularity found in the infinite shell collision.