Engineering the electromagnetic environment of a nanometre-scale light emitter by use of a photonic cavity can significantly enhance its spontaneous emission rate, through cavity quantum electrodynamics in the Purcell regime. This effect can greatly reduce the lasing threshold of the emitter, providing a low-threshold laser system with small footprint, low power consumption and ultrafast modulation. An ultralow-threshold nanoscale laser has been successfully developed by embedding quantum dots into a photonic crystal cavity (PCC). However, several challenges impede the practical application of this architecture, including the random positions and compositional fluctuations of the dots, extreme difficulty in current injection, and lack of compatibility with electronic circuits. Here we report a new lasing strategy: an atomically thin crystalline semiconductor--that is, a tungsten diselenide monolayer--is non-destructively and deterministically introduced as a gain medium at the surface of a pre-fabricated PCC. A continuous-wave nanolaser operating in the visible regime is thereby achieved with an optical pumping threshold as low as 27 nanowatts at 130 kelvin, similar to the value achieved in quantum-dot PCC lasers. The key to the lasing action lies in the monolayer nature of the gain medium, which confines direct-gap excitons to within one nanometre of the PCC surface. The surface-gain geometry gives unprecedented accessibility and hence the ability to tailor gain properties via external controls such as electrostatic gating and current injection, enabling electrically pumped operation. Our scheme is scalable and compatible with integrated photonics for on-chip optical communication technologies.

Fast, high efficiency and low error single-photon sources are required for the implementation of a number of quantum information processing applications. The fastest triggered single-photon sources to date have been demonstrated using epitaxially grown semiconductor quantum dots (QDs), which can be conveniently integrated with optical microcavities. Recent advances in QD technology, including demonstrations of high temperature and telecommunications wavelength single-photon emission, have made QD single-photon sources more practical. Here we discuss the applications of single-photon sources and their various requirements, before reviewing the progress made on a QD platform in meeting these requirements.

Monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) have emerged as new optoelectronic materials in the two dimensional (2D) limit, exhibiting rich spin-valley interplays, tunable excitonic effects, and strong light-matter interactions. An essential yet undeveloped ingredient for many photonic applications is the manipulation of its light emission. Here we demonstrate the control of excitonic light emission from monolayer tungsten diselenide (WSe 2 ) in an integrated photonic structure, achieved by transferring one monolayer onto a photonic crystal (PhC) with a cavity. In addition to the observation of greatly enhanced (~60 times) photoluminescence of WSe 2 and an effectively coupled cavity-mode emission, we are able to redistribute the emitted photons both polarly and azimuthally in the far field through designing PhC structures, as revealed by momentumresolved microscopy. A 2D optical antenna is thus constructed. Our work suggests a new way of manipulating photons in hybrid 2D photonics, important for future energy efficient optoelectronics and 2D nano-lasers.

Integrated photonics will play a key role in quantum systems as they grow from few-qubit prototypes to tens of thousands of qubits. The underlying optical quantum technologies can only be realized through the integration of these components onto quantum photonic integrated circuits (QPICs) with accompanying electronics. In the last decade, remarkable advances in quantum photonic integration have enabled table-top experiments to be scaled down to prototype chips with improvements in efficiency, robustness, and key performance metrics. These advances have enabled integrated quantum photonic technologies combining up to 650 optical and electrical components onto a single chip that are capable of programmable quantum information processing, chip-to-chip networking, hybrid quantum system integration, and high-speed communications. In this roadmap article, we highlight the status, current and future challenges, and emerging technologies in several key research areas in integrated quantum photonics, including photonic platforms, quantum and classical light sources, quantum frequency conversion, integrated detectors, and applications in computing, communications, and sensing. With advances in materials, photonic design architectures, fabrication and integration processes, packaging, and testing and benchmarking, in the next decade we can expect a transition from single- and few-function prototypes to large-scale integration of multi-functional and reconfigurable devices that will have a transformative impact on quantum information science and engineering.

Neural networks have proven effective for solving many difficult computational problems. Implementing complex neural networks in software is very computationally expensive. To explore the limits of information processing, it will be necessary to implement new hardware platforms with large numbers of neurons, each with a large number of connections to other neurons. Here we propose a hybrid semiconductor-superconductor hardware platform for the implementation of neural networks and large-scale neuromorphic computing. The platform combines semiconducting few-photon light-emitting diodes with superconducting-nanowire single-photon detectors to behave as spiking neurons. These processing units are connected via a network of optical waveguides, and variable weights of connection can be implemented using several approaches. The use of light as a signaling mechanism overcomes fanout and parasitic constraints on electrical signals while simultaneously introducing physical degrees of freedom which can be employed for computation. The use of supercurrents achieves the low power density necessary to scale to systems with enormous entropy. The proposed processing units can operate at speeds of at least 20 MHz with fully asynchronous activity, light-speed-limited latency, and power densities on the order of 1 mW/cm 2 for neurons with 700 connections operating at full speed at 2 K. The processing units achieve an energy efficiency of ≈ 20 aJ per synapse event. By leveraging multilayer photonics with deposited waveguides and superconductors with feature sizes > 100 nm, this approach could scale to systems with massive interconnectivity and complexity for advanced computing as well as explorations of information processing capacity in systems with an enormous number of information-bearing microstates.