A high accuracy, high resolution, remote control uniaxial stress apparatus

A uniaxial stress apparatus designed for low-temperature light-scattering experiments is described. It is more compact and potentially more accurate than previous designs. The apparatus can be used to produce a compressive uniaxial force of up to 8.92×108 dynes with an estimated accuracy of 1.5% and can operate in a temperature range of 1.2 to 300 K. The design does not restrict this apparatus to light-scattering measurements and it could be easily modified for application to tensile uniaxial stress. This apparatus has been used to observe the splitting of the valley-orbit Raman line in Ge(As) as a function of uniaxial stress along the [110] axis and to successfully apply the highest reported uniaxial stress along the [110] axis in germanium, 23 kilobar.