Gravitational field of a spinning radiation beam pulse in higher dimensions

We study the gravitational field of a spinning radiation beam pulse in a higher-dimensional spacetime. We derive first the stress-energy tensor for such a beam in a flat space-time and find the gravitational field generated by it in the linear approximation. We demonstrate that this gravitational field can also be obtained by boosting the Lense-Thirring metric in the limit when the velocity of the boosted source is close to the velocity of light. We then find an exact solution of the Einstein equations describing the gravitational field of a polarized radiation beam pulse in a spacetime with arbitrary number of dimensions. In a D-dimensional spacetime this solution contains [D/2] arbitrary functions of one variable (retarded time u), where [d] is the integer part of d. For the special case of a four-dimensional spacetime we study effects produced by such a relativistic spinning beam on the motion of test particles and light.