  The sequential melting of the bottomonium states is one of the important
signals for the existence of a quark gluon plasma. The study of bottomonia
spectral functions on the lattice is a difficult task for many reasons.
Calculations based on NRQCD, that are commonly used for such purpose, are not
applicable at high temperatures. In this work we propose a new method to study
this problem by calculating the spatial screening masses of bottomonium states.
We calculate the spatial meson correlators and extract the screening masses for
mesons in different quantum channels using highly improved staggered quark
(HISQ) action for bottom quarks and dynamical $2+1$ flavor QCD HISQ gauge
configurations. The typical lattices we choose are of size $N_s^3 \times
N_\tau$ where $N_s=4 N_\tau$ and $N_\tau=8, 10, 12$. We consider the
temperature range $T = 300$-$1000$ MeV. We show that for $T > 500$ MeV the
temperature dependence of the screening masses of the ground state bottomonia
are compatible with the expectations based on uncorrelated quark anti-quark
pairs.
