We present results for static hadronic correlation functions in the high-temperature phase of QCD with four flavors of dynamical quarks. We confirm chiral-symmetry restoration through the degeneracies of the spectrum of screening lengths. We also find that the screening lengths for the p and TV channels at rS; 1.27V are close to that in a free quark gas. PACS numbers: 12.38.Gc, 12.38.Mh Simulations of lattice QCD have shown that chiral symmetry is restored at high temperatures, as indicated by the vanishing of the chiral order parameter (##> [1].Additional evidence for the restoration of chiral symmetry can be obtained by using hadronic correlation functions, first studied by DeTar and Kogut [2]. The exponential falloff of such correlations at large spatial separations determines screening lengths, and unbroken symmetries are reflected in degeneracies of these screening lengths. Hadronic correlation functions also yield information on the real-time modes of the high-temperature phase. If the plasma phase contains hadronic modes, as argued by DeTar and Kogut [2], then the corresponding correlation functions should be screened. On the other hand, free quarks also lead to screening in the imaginary-time formulation-through the existence of a finite infrared cutoff on the Euclidean-time components of momenta. It is therefore important to determine the temperature dependence of these screening lengths and to compare them with the results of a computation with free quarks.In this Letter we present results for hadronic correlations obtained on an 8xl6 3 lattice with four flavors of dynamical quarks of mass m q a =0.01, and compare them to values obtained for a gas of free quarks, taking into account finite-size effects in the latter case. We performed measurements on configurations generated by the MT C Collaboration with the hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm (see Ref.[3] for details of the runs), using approximately twenty configurations at each /?, separated by about fifty trajectories, in order to take care of autocorrelations. At /3=5.15 (our estimate for fi c ), where two runs from different starts indicated the presence of metastabilities, we made separate analyses for the two.We restrict our analysis to spatial correlations between local hadronic operators constructed from staggered fermions. The construction of static correlation functions uses methods familiar from mass spectrum analysis at zero temperature [4]. We use a notation common for the corresponding zero-temperature correlations: Afps, Msc, MVT, and Afpv for the meson correlations and B for the baryon correlation [5]. We measured correlations in the z direction. To compensate for antiperiodicity in the imaginary-time direction r, we replaced the temporal average in B by
Biz)-X cos(cooT)B(x,y,z y r),x,y,r where coo =7rT is the lowest Matsubara frequency. It is possible to test for chiral-symmetry restoration directly from the correlation functions without extracting screening masses. Following Ref.[6], we construct for this purpose the chiral projections M 0...