  We study a new holographic gauge theory based on probe D4-branes in the
background dual to D4-branes on a circle with antiperiodic boundary conditions
for fermions. Field theory configurations with baryons correspond to smooth
embeddings of the probe D4-branes with nontrivial winding around an S^4 in the
geometry. As a consequence, physics of baryons and nuclei can be studied
reliably in this model using the abelian Born-Infeld action. However,
surprisingly, we find that the meson spectrum is not discrete. This is related
to a curious result that the action governing small fluctuations of the gauge
field on the probe brane is the five-dimensional Maxwell action in Minkowski
space despite the non-trivial embedding of the probe brane in the curved
background geometry.
