PHENIX (Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interactions eXperiment) is one of the four experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider located at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Its primary research goals are the discovery and the examination of the quark gluon plasma, a state of matter where the strong interaction is dominant and the quarks and gluons are not bound in hadrons, and the analysis of the spin structure of the proton.