Trapped ions arranged in Coulomb crystals provide us with the elements to study the physics of a single spin coupled to a boson bath. In this work we show that optical forces allow us to realize a variety of spin-boson models, depending on the crystal geometry and the laser configuration. We study in detail the Ohmic case, which can be implemented by illuminating a single ion with a travelling wave. The mesoscopic character of the phonon bath in trapped ions induces new effects like the appearance of quantum revivals in the spin evolution.
@article{arxiv.0710.5145,
title = {Mesoscopic Spin-Boson Models of Trapped Ions},
author = {D. Porras and F. Marquardt and J. von Delft and J. I. Cirac},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0710.5145},
year = {2009}
}