We present a sample microstate for a black ring in four and five dimensional language. The microstate consists of a black string microstate with an additional D6-brane. We show that with an appropriate choice of parameters the piece involving the black string microstate falls down a long AdS throat, whose M-theory lift is AdS_3 x S2. We wrap a spinning dipole M2-brane on the S2 in the probe approximation. In IIA, this corresponds to a dielectric D2-brane carrying only D0-charge. We conjecture this is the first approximation to a cloud of D0-branes blowing up due to their non-abelian degrees of freedom and the Myers effect.

We study the smooth non-supersymmetric three-charge microstates of Jejjala, Madden, Ross and Titchener using Kaluza-Klein reductions of the solutions to five and four dimensions. Our aim is to improve our understanding of the relation between these non-supersymmetric solutions and the well-studied supersymmetric cases. We find some surprising qualitative differences. In the five-dimensional description, the solution has orbifold fixed points which break supersymmetry locally, so the geometries cannot be thought of as made up of separate half-BPS centers. In the four-dimensional description, the two singularities in the geometry are connected by a conical singularity, which makes it impossible to treat them independently and assign unambiguous brane charges to these centers.

We construct extremal, spherically symmetric black hole solutions to 4D supergravity with charge assignments that preclude BPS-saturation. In particular, we determine the ground state energy as a function of charges and moduli. We find that the mass of the non-BPS black hole remains that of a marginal bound state of four basic constituents throughout the entire moduli space and that there is always a non-zero gap above the BPS bound.