Di-Hadron and Jet-Hadron Correlations in PYTHIA

The solenoid tracker at RHIC (STAR), located at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, has the primary purpose of studying the formation and characteristics of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), which allows us to better understand the universe shortly after the Big Bang. The high-energy events simulated in PYTHIA are used to model the conditions at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) and in turn contribute to the overarching goal at STAR. A jet is a collimated spray of particles produced in a collision which has kinematics that are correlated with the quark or gluon that produced it. PYTHIA is a tool used in nuclear and particle physics for the generation of events in high-energy collisions. The research covered here includes the plotted correlations for the difference in the azimuthal angle between hadrons in the collisions. These azimuthal angle correlations are plotted for different transverse momentum cuts developed from PYTHIA simulations for proton-proton collisions. FastJet is used to find and analyze jets resulting from these collisions. Data from the latest run at RHIC can be used to produce jet-hadron azimuthal correlation plots at the top RHIC energy of 200 GeV and be compared to the theoretical models created from PYTHIA simulations.