  The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider collides heavy nuclei at
ultrarelativistic energies, creating a strongly interacting, partonic medium
that is opaque to the passage of high energy quarks and gluons. Direct jet
reconstruction applied to these collision systems provides a crucial constraint
on the mechanism for in-medium parton energy loss and jet-medium interactions.
However, traditional jet reconstruction algorithm operating in the large soft
background at RHIC give rise to fake jets well above the intrinsic production
rate of high-pT partons, impeding the detection of the low cross section jet
signal at RHIC energies. We developed a new jet reconstruction algorithm that
uses a Gaussian filter to locate and reconstruct the jet energy. This algorithm
is combined with a fake jet rejection scheme that provides efficient jet
reconstruction with acceptable fake rate in a background environment up to the
central Au + Au collision at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV. We present results of its
application in p + p and Cu + Cu collisions using data from the PHENIX
detector, namely p + p cross section, Cu + Cu jet yields, the Cu + Cu nuclear
modification factor, and Cu + Cu jet-jet azimuthal correlation.
