It may have been a holiday weekend in the US and UK, but physics never takes the day off. A conference entitled Particle Physics and Cosmology took place in France, and featured a talk by Giovanni Punzi, a member of Fermilab's CDF collaboration. Although the talk primarily focused on the search for the Higgs boson at Fermi and CERN, he managed to slip in five slides on a result we discussed just a month ago: the prospect that the Tevatron has spotted a previously unknown particle with a mass of 150GeV. The slide makes clear that the CDF detector team has continued crunching its way through its data, and the case for a new particle has gotten stronger.

The results in April were produced by looking at events that produced a W boson and a pair of jets of lighter particles. After subtracting out all the other events that produce this sort of pattern, it's possible to see a peak in the data at the energy associated with W/W and W/Z production. But, just to the right of that, the authors saw a second peak, which suggested the possibility of a new particle being produced, one that has a mass that doesn't correspond to anything in the standard model.

The peak was a bit over three standard deviations away from where we'd expect the data to graph if nothing unusual was happening here. In physics, consensus has been that nothing has been discovered until we have data at five standard deviations, so the initial results were considered reason to pay attention, but nothing definitive. Fortunately, they became apparent when only a portion of the Tevatron data was analyzed; working with more of the data set should help clarify whether the peak is a statistical fluke.

According to Punzi, we're not at discovery yet, but we're getting tantalizingly close. The first results were generated using 4.3 inverse femtobarns of data; we're now up to 7.3fb-1, the peak is not going away, and the results are now closer to the five standard deviation standard. In addition, the detector team has gone back and eliminated some alternative explanations, like background from top quark production.

At this point, we're really waiting for the team behind the second detector at Fermi to weigh in (these results come from CDF, but Fermi also has a second detector, called Dzero). Although this doesn't appear to be a statistical fluke, it could be a hardware fluke or a product of the method they used for getting rid of the background events. Dzero is different hardware, and the background models are specific to each detector, so looking at data from CDF's sibling should go a long way toward giving us confidence that this peak is real. The same applies to data from the LHC.

Given the potential significance, chances are very good that all these teams are rushing to complete this analysis; I'd expect we'll know whether it reaches five sigma and is seen in other detectors before the summer is out.

One of the reasons I expect that is the speed at which this story is developing—the whole thing provides a nice demonstration of how the Internet has transformed science. For starters, the original CDF result was hosted on the arXiv preprint server, so people could have a look at the data and arguments presented in it before it had even made it through peer review (it has since been published in Physical Review Letters). Responses to the results have already appeared in the arXiv, and Punzi spent part of his talk addressing some of those.

The slides from his talk are now available, hosted on the conference's website (you can find the relevant section by searching for "W-jj excess"). One of the attendees wrote a blog post on it; that, in turn, got picked up by Cosmic Variance, on the popular Discover Blogs site, which is where I found it. Following the links from those blog posts made it possible to find new draft papers on theoretical explanations for the 150GeV particle.

Not all fields of science have been this thoroughly transformed by the openness that the Internet allows. But for those that have, it's hard to escape the sense that it has been like punching the accelerator. Peer review, reanalysis, and community responses all take place in real time, all before initial results even have the opportunity to appear in print. And, for the public, that means a closer view of the hottest news and the process that produced it.