But what would this "super rubber band" be made of?
A rubber-like solid substance that can absorb and release "very large" quantities of energy, of course. And that's just what a team of engineers at UMass Amherst have engineered.
The team announced the development of the substance, which is also programmable, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"This new material holds great promise for a wide array of applications, from enabling robots to have more power without using additional energy, to new helmets and protective materials that can dissipate energy much more quickly," UMass Amherst said in a Feb. 2 news release.
The hypothetical super rubber band is made from a new "metamaterial"—a substance engineered to have a property not found in naturally occurring materials—that combines an elastic, rubber-like substance with tiny magnets embedded in it, according to the university.
The material takes advantage of phase shifts—like when a liquid turns to a gas—and the energy released or absorbed in the process, UMass said.
But shifts also can occur from one solid phase to another, UMass said, and a phase shift that releases energy can be harnessed as a power source.
"To amplify energy release or absorption, you have to engineer a new structure at the molecular or even atomic level," said Crosby, senior author of the paper.
This process has proven to be challenging, he said, and even more difficult to do in a predictable way.
By using metamaterials, however, "we have overcome these challenges, and have not only made new materials, but also developed the design algorithms that allow these materials to be programmed with specific responses, making them predictable," Crosby said.
UMass said the team was inspired by "lightning-quick" responses seen in nature, like the snap of a Venus flytrap and trap-jaw ants.
Xudong Liang, the paper's lead author and professor at Harbin Institute of Technology in Shenzhen, China, said the team has taken this quick response to the next level.
"By embedding tiny magnets into the elastic material, we can control the phase transitions of this metamaterial," Liang said. "And because the phase shift is predictable and repeatable, we can engineer the metamaterial to do exactly what we want it to do: either absorbing the energy from a large impact, or releasing great quantities of energy for explosive movement."
The U.S. Army Research Laboratory, U.S. Army Research Office and Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, supported this research, UMass said. The research has applications "in any scenario where either high-force impacts or lightning-quick responses are needed."