The laws that explain how pizza gets uniformly cooked in an oven are not valid for systems of atoms at ultracold temperatures. A team of researchers at the Center for Theoretical Physics of Complex Systems, within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS, South Korea) has designed an innovative method to study how interacting particles behave at temperatures close to absolute zero, and found a situation where the laws of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics are not respected, energy is not evenly distributed, and equilibrium is not reached. Their findings are published in Physical Review Letters.