Three-dimensional super Yang-Mills with unquenched flavor

A bstract We construct analytically the gravity duals of three-dimensional, super Yang-Mills-type theories with N = 1 supersymmetry coupled to N f 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 N f 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 AdS 4 fixed point dual to a Chern-Simons-matter theory. For light quarks the theories exhibit quasi-conformal dynamics (walking) at energy scales m q ≪ E ≪ λN f / N , with λ = g YM 2 N the ’t Hooft coupling.