The Plane-Wave/Super Yang-Mills Duality

We present a self-contained review of the Plane-wave/super-Yang-Mills duality, which states that strings on a plane-wave background are dual to a particular large R-charge sector of N = 4, D = 4 superconformal U(N) gauge theory. This duality is a specification of the usual AdS/CFT correspondence in the “Penrose limit”. The Penrose limit of AdS5 × S leads to the maximally supersymmetric ten dimensional plane-wave (henceforth “the” plane-wave) and corresponds to restricting to the large R-charge sector, the BMN sector, of the dual superconformal field theory. After assembling the necessary background knowledge, we state the duality and review some of its supporting evidence. We review the suggestion by ’t Hooft that Yang-Mills theories with gauge groups of large rank might be dual to string theories and the realization of this conjecture in the form of the AdS/CFT duality. We discuss plane-waves as exact solutions of supergravity and their appearance as Penrose limits of other backgrounds, then present an overview of string theory on the plane-wave background, discussing the symmetries and spectrum. We then make precise the statement of the proposed duality, classify the BMN operators, and mention some extensions of the proposal. We move on to study the gauge theory side of the duality, studying both quantum and non-planar corrections to correlation functions of BMN operators, and their operator product expansion. The important issue of operator mixing and the resultant need for re-diagonalization is stressed. Finally, we study strings on the plane-wave via light-cone string field theory, and demonstrate agreement on the one-loop correction to the string mass spectrum and the corresponding quantity in the gauge theory. A new presentation of the relevant superalgebra is given.