<p>I wouldn’t necessarily single out CCS as best for research.</p>
<p>But I will say that if your top goal is to arrive at some cutting edge lab bench somewhere and discover something new, you will want to expand your set of possible schools to research universities like Berkeley, Stanford, and Caltech. Places with giga-bucks of funded research are just going to have more lab benches, and more places to sit in front of them.</p>
<p>Among the things you would get at a small college are a sense of community, more individual attention, and (maybe guessing here) more encouragement to strike out in your own direction, as opposed to being plugged into some bigger research enterprise.</p>
<p>If you mark the start of modern physics to the publication of Galileo’s first book in 1586, you can appreciate there’s a fair amount of already discovered physics to learn, if only to ensure you’re not rediscovering something already known. So my general purpose suggestion is to focus on how good a fit the learning environment of different schools feels when visiting as the higher priority vs. the research environment.</p>