Quasistatic probes of the QCD plasma

Screening correlators and masses were studied at finite temperature in QCD with two flavors of dynamical staggered quarks on a lattice. The spectrum of screening masses show a hierarchical approach to chiral symmetry restoration. Control of explicit chiral symmetry breaking through the quark mass was shown to be an important step toward understanding this phenomenon. No sign of decay was found in the finite temperature scalar mesonlike correlators in the confined phase.