gauge configuration or the quark mass. It would be useful to address the above points, and some progress has been made [117,142,143]. Here we take the opportunity to examine the ap- proach taken in [142]. The idea was to take the well-documented Constable- Myers supergravity solution of chapter 4, whose dual describes many of the characteristics of QCD, most crucially, chiral symmetry breaking. The salient features of the model are These points go a considerable way towards addressing the short-comings mentioned earlier. We will, however, continue to adopt the phenomenolog- ical approach of treating the background as describing an N = 3 theory rather than N = ∞ . Furthermore, the string theory construction can only realise a U(1) axial symmetry and does not provide a holographic descrip- tion of the axial vector mesons. We artificially include the appropriate fields 86 • The excited meson mass spectrum scales like the excitation number n . Experimentally, the masses scale like √$_{n}$$_{, a result which a simple}$ flux model can reproduce (see [117]) • The background gauge configuration in which the quarks live is non- supersymmetric, and has a running coupling • The mass gap arises naturally as a result of the non-supersymmetric gauge configuration • The holographic dual of the quark bilinear is explicit in the string configuration • The quark condensate is a prediction of the gauge configuration, and is determined by the quark mass