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A spin-photon interface should operate with both coherent photons and a coherent spin to enable cluster-state generation and entanglement distribution. In high-quality devices, self-assembled GaAs quantum dots are near-perfect emitters of on-demand coherent photons. However, the spin rapidly decoheres via the magnetic noise arising from the host nuclei. Here, we address this drawback by implementing an all-optical nuclear-spin cooling scheme on a GaAs quantum dot. The electron-spin coherence time increases 156-fold from $T_2^*$ = 3.9 ns to 0.608 $\mu$s. The cooling scheme depends on a non-collinear term in the hyperfine interaction. The results show that such a term is present even though the strain is low and no external stress is applied. Our work highlights the potential of optically-active GaAs quantum dots as fast, highly coherent spin-photon interfaces.

Proposals for large-scale semiconductor spin-based quantum computers require high-fidelity single-shot qubit readout to perform error correction and read out qubit registers at the end of a computation. However, as devices scale to larger qubit numbers integrating readout sensors into densely packed qubit chips is a critical challenge. Two promising approaches are minimising the footprint of the sensors, and extending the range of each sensor to read more qubits. Here we show high-fidelity single-shot electron spin readout using a nanoscale single-lead quantum dot (SLQD) sensor that is both compact and capable of reading multiple qubits. Our gate-based SLQD sensor is deployed in an all-epitaxial silicon donor spin qubit device, and we demonstrate single-shot readout of three $^{31}$P donor quantum dot electron spins with a maximum fidelity of 95%. Importantly in our device the quantum dot confinement potentials are provided inherently by the donors, removing the need for additional metallic confinement gates and resulting in strong capacitive interactions between sensor and donor quantum dots. We observe a $1/d^{1.4}$ scaling of the capacitive coupling between sensor and $^{31}$P dots (where $d$ is the sensor-dot distance), compared to $1/d^{2.5-3.0}$ in gate-defined quantum dot devices. Due to the small qubit size and strong capacitive interactions in all-epitaxial donor devices, we estimate a single sensor can achieve single-shot readout of approximately 15 qubits in a linear array, compared to 3-4 qubits for a similar sensor in a gate-defined quantum dot device. Our results highlight the potential for spin qubit devices with significantly reduced sensor densities.