Quantum reservoir computing on Pasqal neutral atoms platform

In this thesis we investigate Quantum Reservoir Computing (QRC) as a non-variational paradigm for quantum machine learning on near-term neutral-atom devices. Motivated by the limitations of NISQ hardware, we implement a QRC pipeline in Pasqal’s Pulser environment that encodes classical inputs into detuning waveforms and extracts embeddings from Pauli-Z and ZZ observables. We design two encoding strategies: a global detuning applied to all atoms and a local detuning. Their performance is benchmarked against a classical PCA baseline using logistic regression. We find that QRC embeddings consistently outperform the classical features, with peak test accuracies of 90.17% (global) and 89.61% (local) compared to ≃ 85% for PCA. The advantage is especially marked in low-data regimes, where quantum dynamics enrich the feature space accessible to linear classifiers. We also identify practical challenges, such as symmetry-induced redundancy in global encoding and the absence of per-qubit detuning in current hardware. This establishes QRC as a promising and experimentally grounded framework to exploit the dynamical richness of neutral-atom platforms for supervised learning in the NISQ era.