The chances of discovering a particle that seemed imminent due to recent data provided by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has decreased after what seemed like significant data pointing to the discovery has now disappeared.

The excitement at the potential discovery was due to the ways in which our understanding of the universe would open up once this particle was eventually discovered but experts have had to put the excitement on hold – maybe for years to come, according to a report by the BBC.

David Charlton of Birmingham University was speaking at a conference in Chicago where the results of the LHC data was being presented and expressed the team’s disappointment at not being as close to the discovery as they first thought.

“There was a lot of excitement when we started to collect data. But in the [latest results] we see no sign of a bump, there’s nothing. It is a pity because it would have been a really fantastic thing if there had been a new particle.”

If the particle had been discovered it would have helped towards answering questions such as what exactly is dark matter as well as information Einstein could only dream of.

Despite the disappointment, the competing Atlas team in charge of the project using the LHC, were not entirely convinced the ‘bump’ that was found in the data which indicated the particle was significant or not. However, as it turned out their hopes were dashed.

Prof Fabiola Gianotti, director of CERN who runs the LHC, says despite the disappointment the LHC is making a lot of progress in its journey and believes this is just the beginning.

“The superb performance of the LHC accelerator, experiments and computing bode extremely well for a detailed and comprehensive exploration of the [new] energy scale, and significant progress in our understanding of fundamental physics.”

Four years ago, the LHC discovered the Higgs Boson – a particle that went towards the prediction of the current theory of subatomic physics.