  We study the properties of the free energy of infinitely heavy quark
anti-quark 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 in the deconfinement phase. The
singlet and triplet free energies are defined in Coulomb gauge which is
equivalent to their gauge invariant definitions recently introduced by
Philipsen. We analyzed 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.
