Toward the end of last year, the people behind the Large Hadron Collider announced that they might have found signs of a new particle. Their evidence came from an analysis of the first high-energy data obtained after the LHC's two general-purpose detectors underwent an extensive upgrade. While the possible new particle didn't produce a signal that reached statistical significance, it did show up in both detectors, raising the hope that the LHC was finally on to some new physics.

This week, those hopes have officially been dashed. Physicists used a conference to release their analysis of the flood of data that came out of this year's run. According to their data, the area of the apparent signal is filled by nothing but statistical noise.

The search for new particles in data from the LHC starts with a calculation of the sorts of things we should expect to see at a given energy. The Standard Model, which describes particles and forces, can be used to make predictions of the frequency at which specific particles will pop out of collisions, as well as what those particles will decay into. So, for example, the Standard Model might indicate that two electrons should appear in five percent of the collisions that occur at a specific energy. Looking for new particles involves looking for deviations from those predictions.

In some cases, those searches are motivated in part by theoretical considerations. That's what happened back in December. A specific hypothesis about gravitons (hypothetical force-carriers for gravity) suggest that they could decay through a process that produces two high-energy photons. The teams behind the ATLAS and CMS detectors searched their data for collisions that produced two photons and then compared their numbers to predictions of what they should see based on the Standard Model.

That analysis turned up an apparent excess at an energy of 750 Giga-electronVolts. While the excess showed up in data from both detectors, it didn't reach levels significant enough to call it a discovery. Under these circumstances, all physicists can do is wait for more data. Fortunately, the LHC has been delivering data at a phenomenal pace.

The entire 2015 high-energy run produced just under four inverse-femtobarns (don't ask, it's just what physicists use) of data. Now, with only part of the data from this year's run, they were able to add another 12.9 inverse femtobarns to the analysis. And, with this new data, the bump in the earlier analysis went away. "No significant excess is observed over the Standard Model predictions," according to a summary put out by the CMS detector team.

As a result of this analysis, the LHC team is able to put hard limits on the possible masses of this type of graviton (they probably don't exist below four Tera-electronVolts). This doesn't mean that gravitons don't exist—there are other theoretical types—just that we can't find evidence of these particular gravitons.

The same goes for new particles in general. The researchers at the LHC only have a limited amount of computer time to analyze all the data as it's coming in, so they focus on things that are likely to be interesting. Obviously, a hint of a new particle fits that description. But there's plenty of other analyses that won't be happening until sometime after the current data collection run wraps up in the fall.

Still, it's hard not to be disappointed that the most promising hint of a new particle (since the Higgs) has turned out to be a bust.