Screening and thermodynamics of a static quark–antiquark pair in hot medium

Abstract

We discuss various aspects of the singlet interaction of a quark–antiquark pair in a hot medium in lattice formalism. Our theory is full QCD with 3 flavours of degenerate quarks at finite temperature. Using zero-temperature potential we renormalize singlet free energies and discuss effects of screening and string breaking. Internal energy and entropy at infinite separation are also calculated showing non-trivial behaviour in the critical region.