Hoped for Particle just a 'Blip'

                A great “might have been” for the universe, or at least for the people who study it, disappeared Friday. Last December, two teams of physicists working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider reported that they might have been traces of what could be a new fundamental constituent of nature, an elementary particle that is not part of the Standard Model that has ruled particle physics for the last half-century. A bump on a graph signaling excess pairs of gamma rays was most likely a statistical fluke, they said. But physicists have been holding their breath ever since. If real, the new particle would have opened a crack between the known and the unknown, affording a glimpse of quantum secrets undreamed of even by Einstein. On Friday, physicists from the same two CERN teams said that under the onslaught of more data, the possibility of the particle had melted away.