Heavy Quark Potential at Finite Temperature in AdS/CFT

TL;DR

This paper computes the heavy quark potential at finite temperature using AdS/CFT, revealing a smooth, negative potential with a power-law decay at large distances, and introduces a novel method involving complex string trajectories.

Contribution

It presents a new calculation of the heavy quark potential at strong coupling using complex string trajectories and a modified renormalization method within AdS/CFT.

Findings

Potential is smooth and negative for all separations.

Develops an imaginary part beyond a critical distance.

Large separation potential decays as 1/r^4, not exponentially.

Abstract

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 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 > r_c =0.870/\pi T . 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/r^4.