Maria Goeppert Mayer Award Talk: High Transverse Momentum Probes at RHIC

The Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) has been providing collisions of Au ions at ultra-relativistic energies since 2000. Nuclear physicists from around the world have been studying the matter created in these collisions. I will discuss the relevance of high transverse momentum particles as probes of this matter and what we have learned about the properties of the so-called ``Quark Gluon Plasma.'' I will also discuss current efforts to refine our sensitivity to the properties of this matter and present recent results from such efforts.