  The measurements of heavy quarkonium suppression at RHIC and LHC urge theory
to develop intuitive as well as quantitative methods for the description of
$Q\bar{Q}$ melting in the quark-gluon plasma. Here I will present a brief
sketch on the effective field theory strategies underlying the definition of
the heavy quark static potential and report on two recent advances in the
extraction and interpretation of such a potential. On the one side, progress
has been made in obtaining its values from lattice QCD, which promises to make
possible investigating its real and imaginary part non-perturbatively. On the
other side, the existence of an imaginary part emphasizes the dynamical nature
of the melting process and invites us to make a direct connection to the
framework of open quantum systems.
