  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.
