Towards a holographic marginal Fermi liquid

We present an infinite class of 2+1-dimensional field theories which, after coupling to semiholographic fermions, exhibit strange metallic behavior in a suitable large N limit. These theories describe lattices of hypermultiplet defects interacting with parity-preserving supersymmetric Chern-Simons theories with U (N) (N) gauge groups at levels. They have dual anti-de Sitter (AdS) gravity descriptions in terms of lattices of probe M2-branes in AdS₄S^7/Z₊ (for N1, Nk^5) or probe D2-branes in AdS₄P^3 (for N1, Nk^5). We discuss several challenges one faces in maintaining the success of these models at finite N, including backreaction of the probes in the gravity solutions and radiative corrections in the weakly coupled field theory limit.