In its eight years of life, the Large Hadron Collider has produced a jazzy musical score, two knights, a small mammal scandal, and one of the greatest discoveries in our lifetime: the Higgs boson. But this morning, it's delivering some less exciting news: The signals physicists thought could indicate an undiscovered particle have died out.
CERN delivered the dismal news at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Chicago. Scientists had hoped that an "energy blip" known as 750 GeV diphoton excess would reveal a particle that wasn't yet predicted by the Standard Model. But now the particle signals have diminished completely.
With hopes of filling in gaps in our understanding of the Universe, this blip carried a lot of understandable hype. But this finding (or lack thereof) doesn't mean failure for the LHC. A negative result is still a result, and everyone's favorite particle accelerator keeps on smashing.
[h/t Gizmodo]
