Discover reports: What began as a bump has turned out to be nothing more than a statistical ghost.

Physicists at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Chicago announced today that the much-discussed 750 GeV aberration in their data discovered by the Large Hadron Collider at the end of last year disappeared upon further testing.

“There is no excess seen in the 2016 data particularly around 750 GeV, confirms Bruno Lenzi, a physicist at CERN. “All over the mass range the data is consistent with the background only hypothesis.”

It was thought that the bump indicated the presence of a much larger particle new to physics, which could have held exciting implications for everything from the search for dark matter to quantum gravity. [Continue reading…]