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, Tc. In the quenched case, a model of the string passing through heavy valence gluons yields a correct estimate of Tc and the correct behavior of the string tension near Tc. 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.