A recently proposed phenomenological model, which includes non perturbative
effects from dimension two gluon condensates, is applied to analyze the
available lattice data for the heavy quark free energy in the deconfined phase
of quenched QCD. For large qqˉ separations we recover previous results
for the Polyakov loop, exhibiting unequivocal condensate contributions. For the
qqˉ potential at finite temperature and finite separation we find that a
good overall description of the lattice data can be achieved once the
condensate is properly accounted for. In addition, the model predicts a duality
between the zero temperature potential as a function of the qqˉ
separation, on the one hand, and the quark selfenergy as a function of the
temperature, on the other, which turns out to be satisfied to a high degree by
the lattice data.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure