  Expanding the frontiers of information processing technologies and, in
particular, computing with ever increasing speed and capacity has long been
recognized an important societal challenge, calling for the development of the
next generation of quantum technologies. With its potential to exponentially
increase computing power, quantum computing opens up possibilities to carry out
calculations that ordinary computers could not finish in the lifetime of the
Universe, while optical communications based on quantum cryptography become
completely secure. At the same time, the emergence of Big Data and the ever
increasing demands of miniaturization and energy saving technologies bring
about additional fundamental problems and technological challenges to be
addressed in scientific disciplines dealing with light-matter interactions. In
this context, quantum plasmonics represents one of the most promising and
fundamental research directions and, indeed, the only one that enables ultimate
miniaturization of photonic components for quantum optics when being taken to
extreme limits in light-matter interactions.
