Metamaterials and plasmonics are powerful tools for unconventional manipulation and harnessing of light. Metamaterials can be engineered to possess intriguing properties lacking in natural materials, such as negative refractive index. Plasmonics offers capabilities of confining light in subwavelength dimensions and enhancing light–matter interactions. Recently, the technological potential of graphene-based plasmonics has been recognized as the latter features large tunability, higher field-confinement and lower loss compared with metal-based plasmonics. Here, we introduce hybrid structures comprising graphene plasmonic resonators coupled to conventional split-ring resonators, thus demonstrating a type of highly tunable metamaterial, where the interaction between the two resonances reaches the strong-coupling regime. Such hybrid metamaterials are employed as high-speed THz modulators, exhibiting ∼60% transmission modulation and operating speed in excess of 40 MHz. This device concept also provides a platform for exploring cavity-enhanced light–matter interactions and optical processes in graphene plasmonic structures for applications including sensing, photo-detection and nonlinear frequency generation.

We demonstrate coherent optical control of a single hole spin confined to an InAs/GaAs quantum dot. A superposition of hole-spin states is created by fast (10-100 ps) dissociation of a spin-polarized electron-hole pair. Full control of the hole spin is achieved by combining coherent rotations about two axes: Larmor precession of the hole spin about an external Voigt geometry magnetic field, and rotation about the optical axis due to the geometric phase shift induced by a picosecond laser pulse resonant with the hole-trion transition.

An in-plane spin-photon interface is essential for the integration of quantum dot spins with optical circuits. The optical dipole of a quantum dot lies in the plane and the spin is optically accessed via circularly polarized selection rules. Hence, a single waveguide, which can transport only one in-plane linear polarization component, cannot communicate the spin state between two points on a chip. To overcome this issue, we introduce a spin-photon interface based on two orthogonal waveguides, where the polarization emitted by a quantum dot is mapped to a path-encoded photon. We demonstrate operation by deducing the spin using the interference of in-plane photons. A second device directly maps right and left circular polarizations to antiparallel waveguides, surprising for a nonchiral structure but consistent with an off-center dot.

We study plasmonic resonances in electrostatically gated graphene nanoribbons on silicon dioxide substrates. Absorption spectra are measured in the mid-far infrared and reveal multiple peaks, with width-dependent resonant frequencies. We calculate the dielectric function within the random phase approximation and show that the observed spectra can be explained by surface-plasmon-phonon-polariton modes, which arise from coupling of the graphene plasmon to three surface optical phonon modes in the silicon dioxide. a)

Resonantly driven quantum emitters offer a very promising route to obtain highly coherent sources of single photons required for applications in quantum information processing (QIP). Realizing this for on-chip scalable devices would be important for scientific advances and practical applications in the field of integrated quantum optics. Here we report on-chip quantum dot (QD) resonance fluorescence (RF) efficiently coupled into a single-mode waveguide, a key component of a photonic integrated circuit, with a negligible resonant laser background and show that the QD coherence is enhanced by more than a factor of 4 compared to off-resonant excitation. Single-photon behavior is confirmed under resonant excitation, and fast fluctuating charge dynamics are revealed in autocorrelation g((2)) measurements. The potential for triggered operation is verified in pulsed RF. These results pave the way to a novel class of integrated quantum-optical devices for on-chip quantum information processing with embedded resonantly driven quantum emitters.