Baryonic condensates on the conifold

We provide new evidence for the gauge/string duality between the baryonic branch of the cascading SU(k(M + 1)) x SU(kM) gauge theory and a family of type IIB flux backgrounds based on warped products of the deformed conifold and R-3,R-1. We show that a Euclidean D5-brane wrapping all six deformed conifold directions can be used to measure the baryon expectation values, and present arguments based on K-symmetry and the equations of motion that identify the gauge bundles required to ensure worldvolume supersymmetry of this object. Furthermore, we investigate its coupling to the pseudoscalar and scalar modes associated with the phase and magnitude, respectively, of the baryon expectation value. We find that these massless modes perturb the Dirac-Born-Infeld and Chern-Simons terms of the D5-brane action in a way consistent with our identification of the baryonic condensates. We match the scaling dimension of the baryon operators computed from the D5-brane action with that found in the cascading gauge theory. We also derive and numerically evaluate an expression that describes the variation of the baryon expectation values along the supergravity dual of the baryonic branch.