Persistent breather and dynamical symmetry in a unitary Fermi gas

Abstract

SO(2,1) dynamical symmetry makes a remarkable prediction that the breathing oscillation of a scale-invariant quantum gas in an isotropic harmonic trap is isentropic and can persist indefinitely. In two dimensions, this symmetry is broken due to quantum anomaly in the strongly interacting range, and consequently the lifetime of the breathing mode becomes finite. The persistent breather in a strongly interacting system has so far not been realized. Here, we experimentally achieve the long-lived breathing mode in a three-dimensional unitary Fermi gas, which is protected by the SO(2,1) symmetry. The nearly perfect SO(2,1) symmetry is realized by loading the ultracold Fermi gas in an isotropic trap and tuning the interatomic interaction to resonance. The breathing mode oscillates at twice the trapping frequency even for large excitation amplitudes. The ratio of damping rate to oscillation frequency is as small as 0.002, providing an interacting persistent breather. The oscillation frequency and damping rate are nearly constant for different atomic densities and temperatures, demonstrating the robustness of the SO(2,1) symmetry in three dimensions. The factors that lead to the residual damping have also been clarified. This work opens the way to study many-body nonequilibrium dynamics related to the dynamical symmetry.