A Rotating Black Ring Solution in Five Dimensions

The vacuum Einstein equations in five dimensions are shown to admit a solution describing a stationary asymptotically flat spacetime regular on and outside an event horizon of topology S¹×S². It describes a rotating “black ring.” This is the first example of a stationary asymptotically flat vacuum solution with an event horizon of nonspherical topology. The existence of this solution implies that the uniqueness theorems valid in four dimensions do not have simple five-dimensional generalizations. It is suggested that increasing the spin of a spherical black hole beyond a critical value results in a transition to a black ring, which can have an arbitrarily large angular momentum for a given mass.