The sentence about lasers is also strange, I have no idea what is meant there. My only guess is that it might be trying to describe some laser experiment that uses lasers to "heat" a hohlraum to produce a field of photons. Then some other high energy photon beam is used to collide with the photons inside the hohlraum.
edit: Original article from DOE press release is here with a bit more info: https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=119023
https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/physik/mater...
You've previously asked for examples [0] of this type of fraud on HN: so this is one example! Credit to 'smurpy' in this thread, who noticed the 'bot'-like writing style.
So my guess would be that the science news "author" is rewording things to avoid stepping on another author's copyright.
And doing it badly...
https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/physik/mater...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-photon_physics#/media/File...
(In this case though it's about rotating what's shown in the diagram, that is the interactions pictured, not the diagram itself :-))
It's still blows my mind that a photon could do that -- turn into a particle-antiparticle pair, the pair then quickly gets annihilated and turns back into the same photon and continues in the exact same direction and form the initial photon was travelling.
But if this process is real, does it mean that high energy photons travel slower than low energy photons?
Because low energy photons could not transform into particles that have mass, while higher energy photons could and thus spend just a liiiiiiitle bit more time as massive particles that can't travel at the speed of light.
Photons, although mass-less, have energy and can therefore be converted into matter under some circumstances.
Apparently my well intentioned ramblings can be directly converted into brain farts.
What is “stuff” as all matter no energy?
Alternatively, possibly dark matter would qualify, although I am not sure either as we haven't even proven that it exists.
In the sentence "With the theory physicists Gregory Breit and John Wheeler were able to prove that when two high-energy photons collide, a positron and an electron arise, i.e. matter is formed" shouldn't the word be "predict" not "prove"?
A more flagrant example of a strange word choice for a human science writer to make is "A direct conversion would require a laser that emits gamma-ray photons in a highly concentrated steel." Shouldn't the word "steel" instead be "beam"? This seems like the sort of thing an uncomprehending bot might do, conflate those two words.
Are my the nits I've picked, above, unfounded? Does the author of the original paper have any information which might suggest that an actual human wrote the "Science News" piece?
If not I would suggest that we've got a bot on the loose! Eeek!
Further, I think I'm seeing rather a lot of "content" floating around recently which smacks of machine origins.
Also, to Daniel... Great paper. Amazing stuff!