We study Einstein's equations with a localized plane-symmetric source, with close attention to gauge freedom/fixing and to listing all physically distinct solutions. In the vacuum regions there are only two qualitatively different solutions, one curved and one flat; in addition, on each of the two sides there is a free parameter describing how the slab is embedded into the vacuum region. Surprisingly, for a generic slab source the solution must be curved on one side and flat on the other. We treat infinitely thin slabs in full detail and indicate how thick slabs can increase the variety of external geometry pairs. Positive energy density seems to force external geometries with curvature singularities at some distance from the slab; we speculate that such singularities occur in regions where the solution cannot be physically relevant anyway.
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Fulling et al. (2015) studied this question.
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