Static potential in N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory - art. no. 105006

We compute the leading order perturbative correction to the static potentia l in N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. We show that the perturbative expansion contains infrared logarithms which, when resummed, become logarit hms of the coupling constant. The resulting correction goes in the right di rection to match the strong coupling behavior obtained from the AdS/CFT cor respondence. We find that the strong coupling extrapolation of the sum of l adder diagrams goes as root g(2)N, as in the supergravity approach.