Abstract

Motivated by the recent wave of investigations on plane domain wall spacetimes with nontrivial topologies, the present paper deals with (probably) the most simple source field configuration which can generate a spatially planary symmetric static spacetime, namely a minimally coupled massless scalar field that depends only upon a spacelike coordinate. z. It is shown that the corresponding exact solutions (ℳ. g±) are algebraically special, type D-[S-3T] (in11), and represent globally pathologic spacetimes with a G4-group of motion acting on R2 × R orbits. In spite of the model simplicity, these Φ-generated worlds possess naked timelike singularities (reached within a finite universal time by normal nonspacelike geodesics). are completely free of Cauchy surfaces, and contain, in the t-leveled sections, points that cannot be joined by C1-trajectory images of oblique non-spacelike geodesies. Finally, we comment on the possibility of deriving from (ℳ, g±) two other physically interesting Φ-generated” spacetimes by appropriate joining conditions in the (z=0)-plane