High pT Charged Hadron Spectrum in Au+Au Collisions at 200 GeV as Measured by PHENIX

The suppression of single hadrons still provides one of the strongest constraints on energy loss mechanisms in the Quark-Gluon Plasma. Currently the best measurement at RHIC of single particle suppression comes from neutral pions. Charged hadrons have independent sources of systematic uncertainty and can thus provide additional constraints. Off-vertex background from photon conversions and weak decays, which mimick high $p_T$ particles, have limited the measurement of charged hadrons to $p_T < 10$ GeV/c at PHENIX. These background sources can be rejected by the silicon vertex tracker upgrade (VTX) allowing the measurement of the charged hadron spectrum out to a significantly higher momentum. The VTX is capable of performing precision measurements of the distance of closest approach of a track to the primary vertex (DCA). Off-vertex photon conversions and weak decays are vetoed with the VTX by rejecting tracks with large DCA. The status of high-$p_T$ charged tracking and associated high-$p_T$ charged hadron spectrum will be reported.