More disappointing news from the experimental physics community today as the teams that operate the Large Hadron Collider have formally announced that there is no new particle at 750 GeV.

Many people will remember that at the end of last year the particle physics community was buzzing over a new and unexpected result from the LHC. Their data showed something being produced at 750 GeV and decaying primarily into two photons. This did not match with any known particles, and immediately produced hundreds of papers from the theoretical physicists giving possible explanations for it. Everything from dark matter to supersymmetry to the effects of higher dimensions was being proposed as an explanation.

In the end it was just a fluctuation. The LHC spent the last year collecting more data around this energy range, and the mysterious new particle did not re-appear. Based on a comprehensive statistical analysis of both sets of data, it would appear that random chance caused a few extra photons to be produced from known processes at this energy, making us all think that there was something more there.

But that is the nature of science. Often a failure to discover something new is just as important, because it tells us what does not exist. And yet somehow it would have been just a little more interesting to have a new particle to study.