Plumbing the Abyss: Black Ring Microstates

Understand

We construct the first smooth, horizonless ``microstate geometries'' that have the same charges, dipole charges and angular momenta as a BPS black ring whose horizon is macroscopic.

• These solutions have exactly the same geometry as black rings, except that the usual infinite throat is smoothly capped off at a very large depth.
• If the solutions preserve a U(1)x U(1) isometry, then this depth is limited by flux quantization but if this symmetry is broken then the throat can be made arbitrarily deep by tuning classical, geometric moduli.
• Interpreting these ``abysses'' (smooth microstate geometries of arbitrary depth) from the point of view of the AdS-CFT correspondence suggests two remarkable alternatives: either stringy effects can eliminate very large regions of a smooth low-curvature supergravity solution, or the D1-D5-P CFT has quantum critical points.