Heavy quark free energies and screening in SU(2) gauge theory

We study the properties of the free energy of an infinitely heavy quark–antiquark pair in SU(2) gauge theory. By means of lattice Monte Carlo simulations we calculated the free energies in the singlet, triplet, and color averaged channels, both in the confinement and deconfinement phases. The singlet and triplet free energies are defined in the Coulomb gauge which is equivalent to their gauge invariant definitions recently introduced by Philipsen. We analyze the short and the long distance behavior, making comparisons with the zero temperature case. The temperature dependence of the electric screening mass is carefully investigated. The order of the deconfining transition is manifest in the results near $T_c$ and it allows a reliable test of a recently proposed method to renormalize the Polyakov loop.