Disappointed physicists from the Large Hadron Collider report that what initially could have been an intriguing new particle has turned out just to be a statistical burp.

Last December, researchers at the European Center for Nuclear Research saw two readings of what could have been a new particle that might have upended the existing main physics theory. The same centre in 2012 discovered the Higgs boson or "God particle."

The early unconfirmed new particle readings in December set the physics world abuzz. Scientists pored over more data from high-speed atom crashes while theorists tried to figure out what it all means.

At a Chicago physics conference Friday, Tiziano Camporesi, a CERN chief scientific spokesman, said more data show that what they saw was nothing, just a random statistical fluctuation.