In December, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented a sneak peek of the new data collected during the first few months of the Large Hadron Collider's enormously energetic second run. Both experiments reported a small excess of photon pairs with a combined mass around 750 GeV. This small excess could be the first hint of a new massive particle that spits out two photons as it decays, or it might be a coincidental fluctuation that will disappear with more information.
Now, physicists are presenting their latest analyses at the Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy, including a full investigation of this mysterious bump. After carefully checking, cross-checking and rechecking the data, both experiments have come to the same conclusion -- the bump is still there.
"We've re-calibrated our data and made several improvements to our analyses," says Livia Soffi, a postdoc at Cornell University. "These are the best, most refined results we have. But we're still working with the same amount of data we collected in 2015. At this point, only more data could make a significant difference in our ongoing research."
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