Towards a string bit formulation of N=4 super Yang-Mills

Abstract

We show that planar cal N=4 Yang-Mills theory at zero 't Hooft coupling can be efficiently described in terms of 8 bosonic and 8 fermionic oscillators. We show that these oscillators can serve as world-sheet variables, the string bits, of a discretized string. There is a one to one correspondence between the on shell gauge invariant words of the free Y-M theory and the states in the oscillators' Hilbert space, obeying a local gauge and cyclicity constraints. The planar two-point functions and the three-point functions of all gauge invariant words are obtained by the simple delta-function overlap of the corresponding discrete string world sheet. At first order in the 't Hooft coupling, i.e. at one-loop in the Y-M theory, the logarithmic corrections of the planar two-point and the three-point functions can be incorporated by nearest neighbour interactions among the discretized string bits. In the SU(2) sub-sector we show that the one-loop corrections to the structure constants can be uniquely determined by the symmetries of the bit picture. For the SU(2) sub-sector we construct a gauged, linear, discrete world-sheet model for the oscillators, with only nearest neighbour couplings, which reproduces the anomalous dimension Hamiltonian up to two loops. This model also obeys BMN scaling to all loops.