A Big Win in Smalltown: Demanding Dignity in an Era of Neoliberal Austerity

This article explores the concepts of dignity at work and worker voice in the public workplace during a period of surging neoliberal austerity intended to reduce taxes, government regulations, and public services. I ask how the changing landscape of public employment in the neoliberal era has created new and exacerbated existing threats to dignity at work and how workers have responded to such threats. The question is answered by exploring how and why an unlikely group of workers in Smalltown chose to use their collective voice on the job to organize a union. Using ethnographic methods, I am able to look at the strategies of public workers coping with a changing work environment in real time. The case of Smalltown offers a window into the interplay of the global and the local by examining how macro-level neoliberal forces can shape workers’ micro-level responses to attacks on their dignity at work. The findings reveal how neoliberal attacks on public workers in particular settings can trigger collective responses that confront not merely austerity but other threats to dignity as well. This study informs our understanding of dignity at work and worker resistance in the post-Great Recession economy

Characterization of an Ionization Readout Tile for nEXO

A new design for the anode of a time projection chamber, consisting of a charge-detecting "tile", is investigated for use in large scale liquid xenon detectors. The tile is produced by depositing 60 orthogonal metal charge-collecting strips, 3~mm wide, on a 10~\si{\cm} $\times$ 10~\si{\cm} fused-silica wafer. These charge tiles may be employed by large detectors, such as the proposed tonne-scale nEXO experiment to search for neutrinoless double-beta decay. Modular by design, an array of tiles can cover a sizable area. The width of each strip is small compared to the size of the tile, so a Frisch grid is not required. A grid-less, tiled anode design is beneficial for an experiment such as nEXO, where a wire tensioning support structure and Frisch grid might contribute radioactive backgrounds and would have to be designed to accommodate cycling to cryogenic temperatures. The segmented anode also reduces some degeneracies in signal reconstruction that arise in large-area crossed-wire time projection chambers. A prototype tile was tested in a cell containing liquid xenon. Very good agreement is achieved between the measured ionization spectrum of a $^{207}$Bi source and simulations that include the microphysics of recombination in xenon and a detailed modeling of the electrostatic field of the detector. An energy resolution $\sigma/E$=5.5\% is observed at 570~\si{keV}, comparable to the best intrinsic ionization-only resolution reported in literature for liquid xenon at 936~V/\si{cm}.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures, as publishe

Sensitivity and discovery potential of the proposed nEXO experiment to neutrinoless double beta decay

The next-generation Enriched Xenon Observatory (nEXO) is a proposed experiment to search for neutrinoless double beta ($0\nu\beta\beta$) decay in $^{136}$Xe with a target half-life sensitivity of approximately $10^{28}$ years using $5\times10^3$ kg of isotopically enriched liquid-xenon in a time projection chamber. This improvement of two orders of magnitude in sensitivity over current limits is obtained by a significant increase of the $^{136}$Xe mass, the monolithic and homogeneous configuration of the active medium, and the multi-parameter measurements of the interactions enabled by the time projection chamber. The detector concept and anticipated performance are presented based upon demonstrated realizable background rates.Comment: v2 as publishe