Instabilities of thin black rings: closing the gap

We initiate the study of dynamical instabilities of higher-dimensional black holes using the blackfold approach, focusing on asymptotically flat boosted black strings and singly-spinning black rings in D ≥ 5. We derive novel analytic expressions for the growth rate of the Gregory-Laflamme instability for boosted black strings and its onset for arbitrary boost parameter. In the case of black rings, we study their stability properties in the region of parameter space that has so far remained inaccessible to numerical approaches. In particular, we show that very thin (ultraspinning) black rings exhibit a Gregory-Laflamme instability, giving strong evidence that black rings are unstable in the entire range of parameter space. For very thin rings, we show that the growth rate of the instability increases with increasing non-axisymmetric mode m while for thicker rings, there is competition between the different modes. However, up to second order in the blackfold approximation, we do not observe an elastic instability, in particular for large modes m ≫ 1, where this approximation has higher accuracy. This suggests that the Gregory-Laflamme instability is the dominant instability for very thin black rings. Additionally, we find a long-lived mode that describes a wiggly time-dependent deformation of a black ring. We comment on disagreements between our results and corresponding ones obtained from a large D analysis of black ring instabilities.