Heavy Quark Potential at Finite Temperature in AdS/CFT Original Research Article

A calculation of the heavy quark potential at finite temperature at strong coupling based on the AdS/CFT correspondence is presented. The calculation relies on the method of complex string trajectories previously introduced in [Javier L. Albacete, Yuri V. Kovchegov, And Anastasios Taliotis. JHEP, 07:074, 2008], and on the introduction of a modified renormalization subtraction. The obtained potential is smooth, negative definite for all quark-antiquark separations, and develops an imaginary part for r>rc=0.870/πT. At large separations the real part of the potential does not exhibit the exponential Debye falloff expected from perturbation theory and instead falls off as a power law, proportional to 1/r4.