On supersymmetry and other properties of a class of marginally deformed backgrounds

We summarize our recent work on supergravity backgrounds dual to part of the Coulomb branch of N = 1 theories constructed as marginal deformations of N = 4 Yang-Mills. In particular, we present a summary of the behaviour of the heavy quark-antiquark potential which shows confining behaviour in the IR as well as of the spectrum of the wave equation. The reduced supersymmetry is due to the implementation of T-duality in the construction of the deformed supergravity solutions. As a new result we analyze and explicitly solve the Killing spinor equations of the N = 1 background in the superconformal limit. (c) 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.