Holographic flavor in N=4 gauge theories in 3d from wrapped branes

Understand

We study the addition of flavor to the gravity dual of N=4 three-dimensional gauge theories obtained by wrapping $N_c$ D4-branes on a two-cycle of a non-compact Calabi-Yau two-fold.

• In this setup the flavor is introduced by adding another set of D4-branes that are extended along the non-compact directions of the Calabi-Yau which are normal to the cycle which the color branes wrap.
• The analysis is performed both in the quenched and unquenched approximations.
• In this latter case we compute the backreacted metric and we show that it reproduces the running of the gauge coupling.