Let's get something out of the way: some of the latest results from the LHC are likely to be a statistical fluke and will vanish as the current, high-energy run starts pumping out data in earnest. In fact, when the results first started getting promoted last week, we got a copy of the paper, but we dropped it after a quick look at the abstract.

And yet here we are, covering it. What changed? As we kept following the story, it became clear that this weird, unlikely-to-be-significant bump in the data had been seen before. More than once. It's probably worth paying attention to until it goes away, because if it doesn't, it may hint at other particles out there that we have yet to discover.

The intriguing results come courtesy of the LHCb detector. Rather than search for new particles, LHCb tracks the decay of particles that contain a b quark (b stands for bottom or beauty, depending on who you talk to). These particles are well understood, so deviations from their expected behavior are relatively easy to spot. And those deviations could point to physics we haven't seen before, possibly including problems with the Standard Model of particles and their interactions.

In this case, the detector was tracking neutral B mesons as they decayed into D mesons. (This happens as the bottom quark in the B meson decays into a charm quark. The second quark in the mesons, a down quark, sits all this out and just pairs with whatever's around.) This decay results in the production of a neutrino (which we can ignore) and a lepton, which is what we're paying attention to here.

Leptons are a group of particles that include the familiar electron and its two heavier, more exotic cousins, the muon and the tau (sometimes called the "tauon" for pedantry's sake). From the perspective of the Standard Model, any lepton will do. The decays should produce the three leptons in proportion to their relative masses (a tau is about twice the mass of a proton, the muon weighs substantially less, and the electron is a lightweight).

In this case, the LHCb collaboration tracked decays that produced either muons or taus, and then measured their relative frequency. And the results were close to the expected value, but not quite. Instead, taus were produced slightly more often than expected, a difference that was 2.1 standard deviations off from the Standard Model expectation.

Now, in particle physics, 2.1 standard deviations is the sort of result that frequently goes away as more data is gathered—it takes three standard deviations to get physicists excited, and five before they start saying they've found something. Which is why, based on the abstract of the paper, there's nothing to get excited about here.

But deep in the discussion, there's an intriguing indication that something unusual might be going on here: "The measured value is in good agreement with previous measurements at BaBar and Belle." These other two detectors studied B mesons produced by electron/positron collisions. So that means three different detectors, using different types of particle collisions, have seen a similar (if similarly weak) excess.

Since the excess is small, it'll take a lot more of these decays before it might rise above the statistical noise—or fade back into it. So, this is something we'll have to watch as the LHC's current run continues.

And it's worth watching, because anything that the Standard Model fails to predict is an indication of new physics—possibly the presence of a new particle that couples with the particles during the decay. So, while it's nothing to get excited about yet, it's something that would be very exciting if it ends up being a discovery.

The arXiv. Abstract number: 1506.08614 (About the arXiv). To be published in Physical Review Letters.