Abstract: The addition of fundamental matter to the AdS/CFT correspondence is attained by the incorporation of flavor D-branes to the geometry. Obtaining the backreaction of flavors is typically a challenging problem. By smearing the branes, the problem simplifies, allowing for the construction of simple geometries capturing dynamical flavor effects. In this talk, I’ll review several works on the construction of backreacted anisotropic geometries, useful to study condensed matter systems such as graphene or neutron stars. I’ll discuss how brane distributions with non monotonic flavor profiles may violate null energy conditions. To conclude, I’ll comment about a recent work on entanglement entropy: the use of smeared branes has allowed us to give further evidence of existing proposals of a probe computation of the holographic entanglement entropy for spherical subregions. As a novelty, we allow for massive fundamentals. By explicit computation, we demonstrate the agreement of the results using both the Ryu-Takayanagi prescription in our backreacted geometries and the probe approach.
