Meson screening masses in (2+1)-flavor QCD

We present lattice QCD results for mesonic screening masses in the temperature range 140 MeV less than or similar to T less than or similar to 2500 MeV. Our calculations were carried out using (2 + 1) flavors of the highly improved staggered quark action, with a physical value for the strange quark mass and two values of the light quark mass corresponding to pion masses of 160 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