Holographic flavor in theories with eight supercharges

TL;DR

This paper reviews holographic duals of gauge theories with eight supercharges, focusing on flavor branes in gravity backgrounds, phase structures, and meson spectra, extending the gauge/gravity duality framework.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of holographic duals with flavor in theories with eight supercharges, highlighting phase structures and meson spectra analysis.

Findings

Holographic duals with flavor branes are constructed in the probe limit.

The phase structure of these theories is captured by gravity duals.

Meson spectra vary across different phases, illustrating the duality's predictive power.

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.