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Scientists are flummoxed about an "unusual bump" in the signal of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is the world's most powerful particle accelerator. The Standard Model is not able to explain it.

The University of Notre Dame researchers have recently released a pre-peer-review paper in order to explain it, underlining the possibility of maybe one, or perhaps two new particles.

"It was so weird that people were forced to chuck their favorite theories and start from scratch," Adam Martin, co-author of the paper, said in a press release. "That's a fun area of particle physics. We're looking into the unknown. Is it one new particle? Is it two new particles?"

Two deviations from events expected by the Standard Model, the theoretical foundation of particle physics, have been detected. Four explanations for the deviation have been suggested, among which is a heavier version of the Higgs boson. With research, new models in particle physics could be suggested, else there may be a "mundane, anticlimactic explanation", according to Martin.

"People are still cautiously optimistic," he said. "Everybody knows that with more data, it could just go away. If it stays, it's potentially really, really, really exciting."

The LHC was harnessed to recreate the state of liquid matter, that existed just a few seconds in the universe after the Big Bang.

The pre-peer-review version of the paper was made accessible in Dec.23,2016 on arXiv.