Mixing of the RR and NSNS sectors in the BMN limit

Abstract

This paper concerns instanton contributions to two-point correlation functions of BMN operators in N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills that vanish in planar perturbation theory. Two-point functions of operators with even numbers of fermionic impurities (dual to RR string states) and with purely scalar impurities (dual to NSNS string states) are considered. This includes mixed RR - NSNS two-point functions. The gauge theory correlation functions are shown to respect BMN scaling and their behaviour is found to be in good agreement with the corresponding D-instanton contributions to two-point amplitudes in the maximally supersymmetric IIB plane-wave string theory. The string theory calculation also shows a simple dependence of the mass matrix elements on the mode numbers of states with an arbitrary number of impurities, which is difficult to extract from the gauge theory. For completeness, a discussion is also given of the perturbative mixing of two-impurity states in the RR and NSNS sectors at the first non-planar level.