Qatar and the 2022 FIFA World Cup: Kick-starting a Global Economy

Overview: December 2, 2010 was my father’s fifty-fifth birthday. He and I were expecting the greatest present that would be given to the United States in a long time. The 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding was that day, and we were giddy waiting for it to be awarded to the United States. We were planning on going together in twelve years, to the games because we love soccer and the United States men’s national team. We have watched every televised game that they have played for years now and were still excited from the previous World Cup. And now, we thought the United States was about to host another World Cup and we could actually be there. Needless to say, we were disappointed when on December 2, 2010 in Zurich, Switzerland FIFA President Sepp Blatter announced that the 2018 FIFA World Cup would be awarded to Russia and that the 2022 FIFA World Cup was awarded to Qatar (Trecker 1-4). According to an article from FIFA’s official webpage, in the voting process one nation was eliminated each round until only one host remained. In the final round of the 2022 voting, Qatar defeated the United States in a vote of 14-8 by obtaining an absolute majority (8). Qatar’s hopes and dreams of bringing one of the world’s greatest sporting events to the Middle East came true. My first reaction was anger because my father might never live to see a World Cup come to the United States again. We are both extremely pro-American and thought that it was ridiculous that a small oil-rich nation could host such a magnanimous sporting event. I knew nothing about Qatar originally except of its oil wealth, and upon starting research for this paper I was planning on writing why it was an awful idea for Qatar to host a World Cup. But upon researching, watching the Qatari bid, and the American bid, I realized that Qatar 2022 will be something very special. I am still disappointed that the United States lost, but I will look forward with wide eyes to see what Qatar does to make their World Cup as amazing as they say it will be

Precision Tests of Parity Violation Over Cosmological Distances

Recent measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background $B$-mode polarization power spectrum by the BICEP2 and POLARBEAR experiments have demonstrated new precision tools for probing fundamental physics. Regardless of origin, the fact that we can detect sub-$\mu$K CMB polarization represents a tremendous technological breakthrough. Yet more information may be latent in the CMB's polarization pattern. Because of its tensorial nature, CMB polarization may also reveal parity-violating physics via a detection of cosmic polarization rotation. Although current CMB polarimeters are sensitive enough to measure one degree-level polarization rotation with $>5\sigma$ statistical significance, they lack the ability to differentiate this effect from a systematic instrumental polarization rotation. Here, we motivate the search for cosmic polarization rotation from current CMB data as well as independent radio galaxy and quasar polarization measurements. We argue that an improvement in calibration accuracy would allow the precise measurement of parity- and Lorentz-violating effects. We describe the CalSat space-based polarization calibrator that will provide stringent control of systematic polarization angle calibration uncertainties to $0.05^\circ$ -- an order of magnitude improvement over current CMB polarization calibrators. CalSat-based calibration could be used with current CMB polarimeters searching for $B$-mode polarization, effectively turning them into probes of cosmic parity violation, i.e. without the need to build dedicated instruments.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure