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In boiling water you can see a prototype of a quantum trick: if part of the liquid turns into long-lived vapor bubbles, the main mass cools down. This is exactly what happens when you sharply jolt a system of interacting electrons: doublons flare up — pairs of particles that absorb excess energy and don’t decay for an astonishingly long time. While they exist, the rest loses entropy (disorder)—a key measure introduced by Boltzmann, and behaves as if its temperature has dropped.

This “quantum freezing by jolt” turns the system into a microscopic refrigerator. By attaching, for example, a carbon nanotube to it, you can transfer the cold if the connection doesn’t destroy the doublons. The most surprising part: the lifetime of these hot pairs grows unimaginably fast — with strong interaction, a doublon could outlive the age of the Universe. Nature also knows cosmic analogs: similar metastable configurations appear in the remnants of supernovae.