Free Energy of a Heavy Quark-Antiquark Pair in a Thermal Medium from AdS/CFT

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We study the free energy of a heavy quark-antiquark pair in a thermal medium using the AdS/CFT correspondence.

• We point out that a commonly used prescription for calculating this quantity leads to a temperature dependence in conflict with general properties of the free energy.
• The problem originates from a particular way of subtracting divergences.
• We argue that the commonly used prescription gives rise to the binding energy rather than the free energy.