New Exotic Operators in the Spectrum of Wilson Lines in General Representations

Abstract

Wilson lines are fundamental probes of gauge theories. We show that, in sufficiently rich representations, they support a large new class of operator insertions. For half-BPS lines in $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM many of these operators have the quantum numbers of the displacement supermultiplet. Their dimension-one superprimaries define natural deformations of the defect theory. By analyzing the associated beta functions, and relating them to specific OPE coefficients, we show that the deformations are marginally relevant. We support our finding with a weak-coupling computation of the four-point function of these operators for any gauge group and representation.