BMN operators and superconformal symmetry

Implications of N = 4 superconformal symmetry on Berenstein-Maldacena-Nastase (BMN) operators with two charge defects are studied both at finite charge J and in the BMN limit. We find that all of these belong to a single long supermultiplet explaining a recently discovered degeneracy of anomalous dimensions on the sphere and torus. The lowest-dimensional component is an operator of naive dimension J + 2 transforming in the [0, J, 0] representation of SU(4). We thus find that the BMN operators are large J generalisations of the Konishi operator at J = 0. We explicitly construct descendant operators by supersymmetry transformations and investigate their three-point functions using superconformal symmetry. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.