The reservoir learning power across quantum many-body localization transition

Harnessing the quantum computation power of the present noisy-intermediate-size-quantum devices has received tremendous interest in the last few years. Here we study the learning power of a one-dimensional long-range randomly-coupled quantum spin chain, within the framework of reservoir computing. In time sequence learning tasks, we find the system in the quantum many-body localized (MBL) phase holds long-term memory, which can be attributed to the emergent local integrals of motion. On the other hand, MBL phase does not provide sufficient nonlinearity in learning highly-nonlinear time sequences, which we show in a parity check task. This is reversed in the quantum ergodic phase, which provides sufficient nonlinearity but compromises memory capacity. In a complex learning task of Mackey–Glass prediction that requires both sufficient memory capacity and nonlinearity, we find optimal learning performance near the MBL-to-ergodic transition. This leads to a guiding principle of quantum reservoir engineering at the edge of quantum ergodicity reaching optimal learning power for generic complex reservoir learning tasks. Our theoretical finding can be tested with near-term NISQ quantum devices.