Isolated Direct Photon Measurements in Au+Au Events with the sPHENIX Detector

The sPHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider will be a new detector which will measure heavy particles, photons, and jets created in high energy heavy ion collisions. One of the goals of this experiment is to use photon-jet pairs to further our understanding of the strongly interacting Quark Gluon Plasma created in Au+Au collisions. We benchmark the capability for reconstructing, identifying, and isolating high energy photons which are created during the hard subprocess, known as direct photons, in high multiplicity Au+Au events. In this study Pythia8 events with a high-$p_{T}$ photon were embedded into central Au+Au \textsc{Hijing} events and a full \textsc{Geant}4 simulation of the detector was performed. We develop and test a technique, which uses the sPHENIX calorimeters, to isolate reconstructed photons from jet fragments in the high multiplicity nuclear background.