Holographic Heavy Quarks and the Giant Polyakov Loop

We consider the Polyakov loop in finite temperature planar N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory defined on a spatial S^3 and in representations where the number of boxes in the Young Tableau k scales so that remains finite in the large N limit. We review the argument that, in the deconfined phase of the gauge theory, and for symmetric representations with row Young tableau, there is a quantum phase transition in the expectation value of the Polyakov loop operator which occurs as the size of the representation is increased.