We examine a class of gravity backgrounds obtained by considering the backreaction of a spatially uniform density of mutually BPS Wilson lines or heavy quarks in N = 4 SUSY Yang-Mills theory. The configurations preserve eight supercharges and an SO(5) subgroup of the SO(6) R-symmetry. They are obtained by considering the 1 4 -BPS geometries associated to smeared string/D3-brane (F1-D3) intersections. We argue that for the (partially) localized intersection, the geometry exhibits a flow from AdS 5 × S 5 in the UV to a novel IR scaling solution displaying anisotropic Lifshitz-like scaling with dynamical critical exponent z = 7, hyperscaling violation and a logarithmic running dilaton. We also obtain a two-parameter family of smeared 1 4 -BPS solutions on the Coulomb branch of N = 4 SYM exhibiting Lifshitz scaling and hyperscaling violation. For a certain parametric range these yield IR geometries which are conformal to AdS 2 × R 3 , and which have been argued to be relevant for fermionic physics.

In this note we compute the expectation value of a circular BPS Wilson loop in the "higher rank" totally symmetric and antisymmetric representations of SU(N) in the 1 quiver N = 2 SCFT, using a matrix model. We discuss the connection with a recent conjecture stating that expectation values of observables in this sector are obtained from N = 4 SYM by a universal renormalization of the 't Hooft coupling.

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Two-dimensional σ-models corresponding to coset CFTs of the type (ĝ k ⊕ĥ )/ĥ k+ admit a zoom-in limit involving sending one of the levels, say , to infinity. The result is the non-Abelian T-dual of the WZW model for the algebraĝ k with respect to the vector action of the subalgebra h of g. We examine modular invariant partition functions in this context. Focusing on the case with g = h = su(2) we apply the above limit to the branching functions and modular invariant partition function of the coset CFT, which as a whole is a delicate procedure. Our main concrete result is that such a limit is well defined and the resulting partition function is modular invariant.