On the Thermodynamics of a Heavy Quark-Antiquark Pair

Thermodynamics of a heavy quark-antiquark pair in SU(3)-QCD is studied below the deconfinement critical temperature, T c . In the quenched case, a model of the string passing through heavy valence gluons yields a correct estimate of T c and the correct behavior of the string tension near T c . For two light flavors, entropies and internal energies can be obtained from the partition function of heavy-light mesons and baryons. They are in a good qualitative agreement with the lattice results.