Family of electrovac colliding wave solutions of Einstein's equations

Beginning with any colliding wave solution of the vacuum Einstein equations, a corresponding electrified colliding wave solution can be generated through the use of a transformation due to Harrison [J. Math. Phys. 9, 1744 (1968)]. The method, long employed in the context of stationary axisymmetric fields, is equally applicable to colliding wave solutions. Here it is applied to a large family of vacuum metrics derived by applying a generalized Ehlers transformation to solutions published recently by Ernst, Garcia, and Hauser (EGH) [J. Math. Phys. 28, 2155, 2951 (1987); 29, 681 (1988)]. Those EGH solutions were themselves a generalization of solutions first derived by Ferrari, Ibanez, and Bruni [Phys. Rev. D 36, 1053 (1987)]. Among the electrovac solutions that are obtained is a charged version of the Nutku--Halil [Phys. Rev. Lett. 39, 1379 (1977)] metric that possesses an arbitrary complex charge parameter