Static Potential in N = 4 Supersymmetric Yang - Mills Theory

We compute the leading order perturbative correction to the static potential in N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. We show that the perturbative expansion contains infrared logarithms which, when resummed, become logarithms of the coupling constant. The resulting correction goes in the right direction to match the strong coupling behavior obtained from the AdS/CFT correspondence. We find that the strong coupling extrapolation of the sum of ladder diagrams goes as g 2 N , as in the supergravity approach.