The field of subatomic particles has existed for over a hundred years now. From the discovery of the
electron that sparked the field, to the discovery of the Higgs Boson, physicists have always wanted to
uncover the subatomic structure of the atoms, nuclei, and their constituents at smaller and smaller levels. By the 1930s, the proton, neutron, and electron had been discovered. These protons and neutrons are types of hadrons, and many different types of hadrons had been discovered by the 1960s. In 1964, Murray Gell-man and George Zweig independently proposed the quark model to explain the different hadrons. A quark is a particle that makes up a hadron, accounting for the many different types of hadrons that had been discovered; the other hadrons were composed of 2 or 3 of the 6 quarks. These include the up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange quarks. The proton is made of 2 up quarks and 1 down quark, while the π0 particle is made of an up and an anti-up, or a down and an anti-down quark, for example. Advancements in technology allowed physicists to be able to accelerate particles and smash them together in particle accelerators and colliders. These new machines were how physicists were able to split open atoms, and the hadrons inside, to uncover these quarks.
In the search for these different quarks, other particles were being discovered as well. This
included the 6 leptons, the electron, the tau, and the muon, and their neutrino counterparts. The leptons are grouped separately from quarks because they participate only in electroweak interactions, while quarks also participate in strong interactions. Electroweak interactions describe the interactions caused by the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force. The strong interactions describe those caused by the strong nuclear force. These 3 forces, along with gravity, are the four fundamental forces of the universe, with the strong force being the strongest force and responsible for most of the energy in the universe. The quarks that make up hadrons cannot exist freely. This is due to the strength of this strong nuclear force. A potential way to study these deconfinable particles is through the use of extremely high-energy accelerators to create Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). QGP, a superdense state of matter, was previously thought to only be formed in high-energy collisions of heavy nuclei, such as gold, copper, or lead. However, recent research has shown evidence of this state of matter being created in high-energy collisions of single protons (p+p). This thesis looks to see if proton+proton collisions with center-of-mass energies of 510 GeV from data taken by the PHENIX Experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). RHIC is a high-energy particle accelerator located at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, New York. PHENIX is a detector and experiment at RHIC. The data is restricted to events that have a large number of particles produced classified through event centrality corresponding to the most central 0.3% of events. Higher centrality and high particle number is typically thought to probe larger collision volumes such as those seen in the larger collision systems. The data is compared to extensive simulations using the PYTHIA, an event generator that can simulate real collisions that occur in PHENIX. The data show signs of a very slight jet suppression, a common characteristic associated with collision systems that are known to form QGP which can't be reproduced by the PYTHIA simulation with selective interesting tuning parameters. A comparison of 200 GeV and 510 GeV p+p data was done with real data and PYTHIA simulations to compare energy dependence and partially also to see if any additional simulation tuning was needed. Lastly, the dataset was analyzed using a second, much broader, centrality cut (0-5%) to see any centrality dependencies in the data and PYTHIA simulations.