We study the free energy of a static quark-antiquark ($Q\overline{Q}$) pair at finite temperature in three flavor QCD with degenerate quark masses using $N_{\tau }=4$ and $6$ lattices with Asqtad staggered fermion action. The static free energy was calculated for different values of the quark mass and the entropy contribution at large distances has been extracted. We also calculate the renormalized Polyakov loop following the approach by Kaczmarek et al.

• Received 14 May 2004

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.70.054503