  The cubic interaction vertex of light-cone string field theory in the
plane-wave background has a simple effective form when considering states with
only bosonic excitations. This simple effective interaction vertex is used in
this paper to calculate the three string interaction matrix elements for states
of arbitrary bosonic excitation and these results are used to examine certain
decay modes on the mass-shell. It is shown that the matrix elements of one
string to two string decays involving only bosonic excitations will vanish to
all orders in 1/mu on the mass-shell when the number of excitations on the
initial string is less than or equal to two, but in general will not vanish
when the number of excitations is greater than two. Also, a truncated
calculation of the mass-shell matrix elements for one string to three string
decays of two excitation states is performed and suggests that these matrix
elements do not vanish on the mass-shell. There is, however, a quantitative
discrepancy between this last result and its (also non-vanishing) gauge theory
prediction from the BMN correspondence.
