We study the static potential between external quark-antiquark pairs in a strongly coupled gauge theory with a large number of colors and massive dynamical flavors, using a dual string description. When the constituent mass of the dynamical quarks is set below a certain critical value, we find a first order phase transition between a linear and a Coulomb-like regime. Above the critical mass the two phases are smoothly connected. We also study the dependence on the theory parameters of the quark-antiquark separation at which the static configuration decays into specific static-dynamical mesons.
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