One ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them?

We construct all 11-dimensional, three-charge BPS solutions that preserve a fixed, standard set of supersymmetries. Our solutions include all BPS three-charge rotating black holes, black rings, supertubes, as well as arbitrary superpositions of these objects. We find very large families of black rings and supertubes with profiles that follow {\it arbitrary} closed curves in the spatial $\IR^4$ transverse to the branes. The black rings copiously violate black-hole uniqueness. The supertube solutions are completely regular and generically have small curvature. They also have the same asymptotics as the three-charge black hole; so they might be mapped to microstates of the D1--D5--p system and used to explain the entropy of this black hole.

Full Text (PDF format)

Published 1 January 2005