Coherent excitation of an ensemble of quantum objects underpins quantum many-body phenomena, and offers the opportunity to realize a quantum memory to store information from a qubit. Thus far, a deterministic and coherent interface between a single quantum system, e.g. a qubit, and such an ensemble has remained elusive. We first use an electron to cool the mesoscopic nuclear-spin ensemble of a semiconductor quantum dot to the nuclear sidebandresolved regime. We then implement an all-optical approach to access these individual quantized electronic-nuclear spin transitions. Finally, we perform coherent optical rotations of a single collective nuclear spin excitation corresponding to a spin wave called a nuclear magnon. These results constitute the building blocks of a dedicated local memory per quantum-dot spin qubit and promise a solid-state platform for quantum-state engineering of isolated many-body systems.

Quantum control of solid-state spin qubits typically involves pulses in the microwave domain, drawing from the well-developed toolbox of magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Driving a solid-state spin by optical means offers a high-speed alternative, which in the presence of limited spin coherence makes it the preferred approach for high-fidelity quantum control. Bringing the full versatility of magnetic spin resonance to the optical domain requires full phase and amplitude control of the optical fields. Here, we imprint a programmable microwave sequence onto a laser field and perform electron spin resonance in a semiconductor quantum dot via a two-photon Raman process. We show that this approach yields full SU(2) spin control with over 98% π-rotation fidelity. We then demonstrate its versatility by implementing a particular multi-axis control sequence, known as spin locking. Combined with electron-nuclear Hartmann-Hahn resonances which we also report in this work, this sequence will enable efficient coherent transfer of a quantum state from the electron spin to the mesoscopic nuclear ensemble.

We present a numerical investigation of the performance of the micropillar cavity single-photon source in terms of collection efficiency and indistinguishability of the emitted photons in the presence of non-Markovian phonon-induced decoherence. We analyze the physics governing the efficiency using a single-mode model, and we optimize efficiency ε and the indistinguishability η on an equal footing by computing εη as function of the micropillar design parameters. We show that εη is limited to ∼ 0.96 for the ideal geometry due to an inherent trade-off between efficiency and indistinguishability. Finally, we subsequently consider the influence of realistic fabrication imperfections and Markovian pure dephasing noise on the performance.