Meson Screening Masses in (2+1)-Flavor QCD

Abstract: We present lattice QCD results for mesonic screening masses in the temperature range 140 MeV $\lesssim T \lesssim$ 2500 MeV. Our calculations were carried out using (2+1)-flavors of the Highly Improved Staggered Quark (HISQ) action, with a physical value for the strange quark mass and two values of the light quark mass corresponding to pion masses of 160 MeV and 140 MeV. Continuum-extrapolated results were obtained using calculations with a variety of lattice spacings corresponding to temporal lattice extents $N_\tau = 6 - 16$. We discuss the implications of these results for the effective restoration of various symmetries in the high temperature phase of QCD, as well as the approach toward the perturbative limit.