Three-dimensional super Yang-Mills with unquenched flavor

Abstract

Abstract: We construct analytically the gravity duals of three-dimensional, super Yang-Mills-type theories with N=1$$ \mathcal{N}=1 $$ supersymmetry coupled to Nf quark flavors. The backreaction of the quarks on the color degrees of freedom is included, and corresponds on the gravity side to the backreaction of Nf D6-branes on the background of N D2-branes. The D6-branes are smeared over the compact part of the geometry, which must be a six-dimensional nearly Kähler manifold in order to preserve supersymmetry. For massless quarks, the solutions flow in the IR to an AdS4 fixed point dual to a Chern-Simons-matter theory. For light quarks the theories exhibit quasi-conformal dynamics (walking) at energy scales mq ≪ E ≪ λNf /N, with λ = gYM2N the ’t Hooft coupling.