A unitary Fermi gas in an isotropic harmonic trap is predicted to show scale
and conformal symmetry that have important consequences in its thermodynamic
and dynamical properties. By experimentally realizing an isotropic harmonic
trap, we study the expansion of a unitary Fermi gas and demonstrate its
universal expansion dynamics along different directions and at different
temperatures. We show that as a consequence of SO(2,1) symmetry, the measured
release energy is equal to that of the trapping energy. In addition, away from
resonance when scale invariance is broken, we determine the effective exponent
γ that relates the chemical potential and average density along the
BEC-BCS crossover, which qualitatively agrees with the mean field predictions.
This work opens the possibility of studying non-equilibrium dynamics in a
conformal invariant system in the future.Comment: 15 pages and 8 figur