On weakly maximal representations of surface groups

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We introduce and study a new class of representations of surface groups into Lie groups of Hermitian type, called weakly maximal representations. We prove that weakly maximal representations are discrete and injective and we describe the structure of the Zariski closure of their image. Furthermore, we prove that the set of weakly maximal representations is a closed subset of the representation variety and describe its relation to other geometrically significant subsets of the representations variety.