Superconformal gauge theories and noncritical superstrings

We consider effective actions for six-dimensional noncritical superstrings. We show that the addition of N units of RR flux and of N-f space-time filling D5-branes produces AdS(5) X S-1 solutions with curvature comparable to the string scale. These solutions have the right structure to be dual to N = 1 supersymmetric SU(N) gauge theories with N-f flavors. We further suggest bounds on the mass-squared of tachyonic fields in this background that should restrict the theory to the conformal window.