Holographic flavor in theories with eight supercharges

Abstract

We review the holographic duals of gauge theories with eight supercharges obtained by adding very few flavors to pure supersymmetric Yang-Mills with sixteen supercharges. Assuming a brane-probe limit, the gravity duals are engineered in terms of probe branes (the so-called flavor brane) in the background of the color branes. Both types of branes intersect on a given subspace in which the matter is confined. The gauge theory dual is thus the corresponding flavoring of the gauge theory with sixteen supercharges. Those theories have in general a non-trivial phase structure; which is also captured in a beautiful way by the gravity dual. Along the lines of the gauge/gravity duality, we review also some of the results on the meson spectrum in the different phases of the theories.