General Relativity and Gravitation, Vol. 32, No. 9, 2000 0001-7701 / 00 / 0900-1757$18.00 / 0  2000 Plenum Publishing Corporation 1757 Gravitational Field of Spherical Domain Walls Farook Rahaman 1 and Subenoy Chakraborty 2 Received July 13, 1999 In this paper we have considered a spherically symmetric domain wall with non vanishing stress component in the direction perpendicular to the plane of the wall. The exact solutions are obtained using functional separability of metric coefficients. Also we have studied the motion of the test particles in different situations. KEY WORDS: domain walls; cosmology; topological defects. 1. INTRODUCTION It is generally assumed that the topological defects are formed at the very early stages of the evolution of the universe when the Universe undertakes a series of phase transitions. In particular, when a discrete symmetry is spontaneously broken domain walls will be formed [1, 2]. The explanation of the formation of large scale structure of the Universe is one of the basic problems, of cosmology even today. The domain wall has become important in recent years from cosmological stand-point when a new scenario of galaxy formation has been proposed by Hill, Schamand Fry [3]. According to them, the formation of galaxies is due to domain walls produced during a phase transition before the recombination era of matter and modifica- tion. In general relativity, domain walls are getting special attention due to their peculiar and interesting gravitational effects. There are many papers have been published on domain walls. Widrow (1989) [5] has studied the gravitational field 1 Department of Mathematics, Jadavpur University, Calcutta 700032, India. E-mail: farook raha- man@hotmail.com 2 Department of Mathematics, Jadavpur University, Calcutta 700032, India. E-mail: subenoy@ juphys.ennet.in