Summary: Home to Bernien's neutral-atom quantum sensing/simulation lab and Romalis's spin-exchange-relaxation-free (SERF) magnetometers, among the most sensitive magnetic sensors in the world.
Notes: Small department, high per-capita PI quality; strong funding base from the Princeton Center for Complex Materials and DOE.
Warnings: Princeton town itself is small and car-dependent; nearest major city (Philadelphia/NYC) requires a train ride.
Shaevitz combines custom super-resolution and multifocal/3D imaging instrumentation with single-molecule tracking to make precision measurements of bacterial cell-shape mechanics, cytoskeletal dynamics (e.g. MreB), collective motility and pattern formation, and animal behavior quantification. His lab pioneered 3D live-cell imaging of bacterial shape during growth and continues to develop chromatic multifocal and localization-microscopy instrumentation in collaboration with the Yang and Gregor labs.
Staggs is PI of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (Advanced ACTPol) and co-Director of the Simons Observatory, leading development and production of very large, sensitive cryogenic transition-edge-sensor (TES) focal-plane detector arrays used to map cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization anisotropies at ever finer angular resolution. This is included as an astronomy pivot on the strength of its quantum-limited cryogenic detector instrumentation, which is the enabling technology for the high spectral/spatial resolution CMB science.
Tank is a pioneer of two-photon laser-scanning microscopy for imaging calcium dynamics in dendrites and neural circuits in vivo, and co-directs the Bezos Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics, which develops large-scale optical recording instrumentation combined with rodent virtual-reality systems to study persistent neural activity and short-term memory. His group's methodological contributions to cellular-resolution optical imaging underpin much of modern systems neuroscience.
Wysocki develops quantum-cascade-laser-based spectroscopic sensing systems, including external-cavity QCLs, dispersion spectroscopy, and mid-IR dual-comb spectrometers, that routinely reach fundamental quantum-noise detection limits for trace-gas sensing; applications span atmospheric/environmental monitoring, drone-based methane leak detection, industrial process control, and human breath-based metabolic/medical diagnostics.
Yang's experimental physical chemistry lab designs new instrumentation to track single proteins, nanoparticles, and other emitters in three dimensions in real time within complex, heterogeneous environments, including a recent time-gated two-photon platform for high-speed 3D single-particle tracking. His group applies these single-molecule tracking and orientation-resolved imaging tools to protein conformational dynamics, functional nanostructures, and active-matter systems.