HOLOGRAPHIC FLAVOR IN THEORIES WITH EIGHT SUPERCHARGES
We review the holographic duals of gauge theories with eight supercharges obtained by adding very few flavors to pure supersymmetric Yang–Mills with 16 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 16 supercharges. Those theories have in general a nontrivial 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.