A Finite-Window Recovery Hierarchy for Local Quantum Memory

When quantum information initially stored in a local qubit disappears, it need not be lost: it may have moved into nearby degrees of freedom or become inaccessible to shallow local control. We introduce finite-window recoverability as an operational channel benchmark that separates these possibilities. It compares optimal recovery from the target site, recovery by a bounded-depth decoder on a finite window, and the unrestricted optimum for that window. Its operational component, local variational recovery, uses local state preparation, window-local control, and target-qubit Pauli readout to certify recoverable memory beyond the target and quantify how much of the same-window advantage is accessible to shallow control. In a disordered kicked-Ising Floquet chain, a depth-6 decoder on a five-site window realizes $Q^{\mathrm{opt}}_0<Q^{\mathrm{shallow}}_2<Q^{\mathrm{opt}}_2$ across the crossover regime, with positive certified gain for most disorder realizations and substantial shallow-accessibility fractions. The signal differs from target-site persistence and reconstructed coherent-information increments. Positive radius-2 gain also persists when the task is embedded in longer open chains using an independent tensor-network backend. Guided by this hierarchy, we test a carrier-deletion task in which the original target register is reset after the dynamics. A depth-8 decoder repairs the input from a radius-3 surrounding halo with held-out median $F_{\mathrm{avg}}=0.758$, above the single-qubit classical benchmark $2/3$, and outperforms optimal one-, two-, and three-site halo-subwindow counterfactuals. These results establish finite-window recovery as a local-control benchmark for off-site quantum memory, diagnosing both where local quantum information remains and whether bounded-depth control can refocus it.