Black Holes on Cylinders

We take steps toward constructing explicit solutions that describe non-extremal charged dilatonic branes of string/M-theory with a transverse circle. Using a new coordinate system we find an ansatz for the solutions with only one unknown function. We show that this function is independent of the charge and our ansatz can therefore also be used to construct neutral black holes on cylinders and near-extremal charged dilatonic branes with a transverse circle. For sufficiently large mass M > M_c these solutions have a horizon that connects across the cylinder but they are not translationally invariant along the circle direction. We argue that the neutral solution has larger entropy than the neutral black string for any given mass. This means that for M > M_c the neutral black string can gain entropy by redistributing its mass to a solution that breaks translational invariance along the circle, despite the fact that it is classically stable. We furthermore explain how our construction can be used to study the thermodynamics of Little String Theory.