Non-renormalisation of extremal correlators in N=4 SYM theory

We show that extremal correlators of chiral primary operators in N=4 supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory with SU(N) gauge group are neither renormalised at first (g2) order in perturbation theory nor receive contribution from any instanton sector at leading order in the semiclassical expansion. This lends support to the strongest version of a new prediction recently put forward on the basis of the AdS/SCFT correspondence.