The ideal Italian pizza, be it Neapolitan or Roman, has a crisp crust flecked with dark spots — marks left by a blazing hot oven. The dough is fluffy, moist and stretchy, and the toppings are piping hot. A pizzeria's brick oven pops these out to perfection, but intrepid home cooks attempting to re-create Italian-style pizzas have more than likely discovered facsimiles are nigh impossible to produce.

"Even if you prepare [the pizza] the same way, you cannot get the same result with just your oven at home," says Andreas Glatz, a physicist at Northern Illinois University and pizza enthusiast. The fact that you need a vaulted brick oven to bake a great Italian-style pizza is well-known, but Glatz and Andrey Varlamov, also a pizza-eater and physicist at the Institute of Superconductors, Oxides and Other Innovative Materials and Devices in Rome, wanted to know why. The secret behind a pizzeria's magic, they concluded in a paper published on arXiv.org last month, is in some unique thermal properties of the brick oven.