So after all the fuss about the leak from ATLAS, a bit sooner than intended and after a lot of people worked over their Easter break, ATLAS released an official, internally reviewed (though preliminary, i.e. not submitted to a journal for independent peer review) result on the topic in question.

The result is here, and they key result is below.

This plot show the mass you get when you add the energy and momenta of two high energy photons seen by ATLAS. The photons have zero mass, but their combined mass is not zero because they are moving away from each other very fast, so have a lot of energy however you look at them*.

If they came from a Higgs boson or some other decaying particle, there would be a bump in this distribution, where lots of them come from the same mass - the mass of the decaying particle.

As you can see, there isn't.

The plot is made more carefully and with more data than the plot the leak was based on.

So sadly, still a null result. In fact according to the prediction for a Higgs in the Standard Model, you wouldn't expect to see anything yet, but you should do sometime soonish. So stay interested in the diphoton mass spectrum, but wait for solid results before opening the champagne...

* This is actually relativity. If they travelled in the same direction as each other, then you could in principle try and catch them up, and their energy would get smaller the faster you moved in their direction (this is the Doppler shift). But if they move away from each other, trying to catch one of them up increases the energy of the other one, and you can't get rid of the energy of the pair no matter how fast you go. And since energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared, this means they have a mass too. In fact we calculate something called the "invariant mass" which doesn't depend at all on whether you try catching one of them up or just sit there in the control room drinking strong coffee...**

** Which you may need after this long footnote. Sorry.

• This article was amended on 12 May. The original stated that if the photons moved away from each other, trying to catch up with one of them would make the other go faster. This has been corrected.