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In general relativity, the Bonnor beam is an exact solution which models an infinitely long, straight beam of light. It is an explicit example of a pp-wave spacetime. It is named after William B. Bonnor who first described it.
The Bonnor beam is obtained by matching together two regions:
On the "cylinder" where they meet, the two regions are required to obey matching conditions stating that the metric tensor and extrinsic curvature tensor must agree.
The interior part of the solution is defined by
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