Yang-Mills instantons in the large-N limit and the AdS/CFT correspondence

We examine a certain 16-fermion correlator in N = 4 supersymmetric SU(N) gauge theory in 4 dimensions. Generalizing recent SU(2) results of Bianchi, Green, Kovacs and Rossi, we calculate the exact N-dependence of the effective 16-fermion vertex at the 1-instanton level, and find precise agreement in the large-N limit with the prediction of the type IIB superstring on AdS(5) x S-5. This suggests that the string theory prediction for the 1-instanton amplitude considered here is not corrected by higher-order terms in the alpha' expansion. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.