  A method for the systematic construction of few-body damped harmonic
oscillator networks accurately reproducing the effect of general bosonic
environments in open quantum systems is presented. Under the sole assumptions
of a Gaussian environment and regardless of the system coupled to it, an
algorithm to determine the parameters of an equivalent set of interacting
damped oscillators obeying a Markovian quantum master equation is introduced.
By choosing a suitable coupling to the system and minimizing an appropriate
distance between the two-time correlation function of this effective bath and
that of the target environment, the error induced in the reduced dynamics of
the system is brought under rigorous control. The interactions among the
effective modes provide remarkable flexibility in replicating non-Markovian
effects on the system even with a small number of oscillators, and the
resulting Lindblad equation may therefore be integrated at a very reasonable
computational cost using standard methods for Markovian problems, even in
strongly non-perturbative coupling regimes and at arbitrary temperatures
including zero. We apply the method to an exactly solvable problem in order to
demonstrate its accuracy, and present a study based on current research in the
context of coherent transport in biological aggregates as a more realistic
example of its use; performance and versatility are highlighted, and
theoretical and numerical advantages over existing methods, as well as possible
future improvements, are discussed.

Quantum Physics