Free energy of a static quark anti-quark pair and the renormalized
Polyakov loop in three flavor QCD

We study the free energy of a static quark anti-quark pair at finite
temperature in three flavor QCD with degenerate quark masses using N_tau=4
and 6 lattices with Asqtad staggered fermion action. The static free energy
was calculated for different values of the quark mass and the entropy
contribution at large distances has been extracted. We also calculate the
renormalized Polyakov loop.