What is the dual of a dipole?

We study gravitational solutions that admit a dual CFT description and carry non-zero dipole charge. We focus on the black ring solution in AdS3 × S3 and extract from it the one-point functions of all CFT operators dual to scalar excitations of the six-dimensional metric. In the case of small black rings, characterized by the level N, angular momentum J and dipole charge q3, we show how the large N and J dependence of the one-point functions can be reproduced, under certain assumptions, directly from a suitable ensemble in the dual CFT. Finally we present a simple toy model that describes the thermodynamics of the small black ring for arbitrary values of the dipole charge. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.