Abstract: Single photons are in demand to implement optical quantum information processing including quantum communications and linear optical quantum computation. To build a quantum computer, for example, it requires a collection of well characterized quantum two-level systems (qubits), which can be completely decoupled from each other and be initialised; quantum logic operations should be possible using external manipulations within the coherence time. The final result of computation can be measured at high fidelity. Low dimensional solid-state systems are very promising to realise these points. In this talk, I will be presenting our experiments on these regimes: stabilized ‘plug and play’ single photon sources from semiconductor quantum dots; quantum coupling between excitonic qubits and photon-exciton interactions in photonic crystals with quantum dots embedded; and photon-number resolved photon detection using two dimensional electron gas based nanowire transistors.