Gravity Dual Corrections to the Heavy Quark Potential at Finite-Temperature

We apply gauge/gravity duality to compute $1/N^2_c$ corrections to the heavy quark potentials of a quark--anti-quark pair ($Q\bar Q$) and of a quark--quark pair ($QQ$) immersed into the strongly coupled N = 4 SYM plasma. On the gravity side these corrections come from the exchanges of supergravity modes between two string worldsheets stretching from the UV boundary of AdS space to the black hole horizon in the bulk and smeared over $S^5$. We find that the contributions to the $Q\bar Q$ potential coming from the exchanges of all of the relevant modes (such as dilaton, massive scalar, 2-form field, and graviton) are all attractive, leading to an attractive net $Q\bar Q$ potential. We show that at large separations $r$ and/or high-temperature $T$ the potential is of Yukawa-type, dominated by the graviton exchange, in agreement with earlier findings. On the other hand, at small-$r T$ the $Q\bar Q$ potential scales as $\sim (1/r) \ln (1/rT)$. In the case of $QQ$ potential the 2-form contribution changes sign and becomes repulsive: however, the net $QQ$ potential remains attractive. At large-$r T$ it is dominated by the graviton exchange, while at small-$r T$ the $QQ$ potential becomes Coulomb-like.