Heavy Quark Potential at Finite Temperature Using the Holographic Correspondence

Albacete, Javier L.; Kovchegov, Yuri V.; Taliotis, Anastasios

Heavy Quark Potential at Finite Temperature Using the Holographic Correspondence

Authors

Albacete, Javier L.

Kovchegov, Yuri V.

Taliotis, Anastasios

Description

We revisit the calculation of a heavy quark potential in N =4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature using the AdS/CFT correspondence. As is widely known, the potential calculated in the pioneering works of Rey et al. and Brandhuber et al. is zero for separation distances r between the quark and the anti-quark above a certain critical separation, at which the potential has a kink. We point out that by analytically continuing the string configurations into the complex plane, and using a slightly different renormalization subtraction, one obtains a smooth non-zero (negative definite) potential without a kink. The obtained potential also has a non-zero imaginary (absorptive) part for separations r > r_c = 0.870/πT . At large separations r 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/r^4 for r > r_0 = 2.702 / πT.
5 pages, 3 figures. Title modified. Discussion extended and references modified