Quantum systems that interact nonlocally with an environment are paradigms for exploring collective phenomena. They naturally emerge in various physical contexts involving long-range, many-body interactions. We consider a general class of such open systems characterized by a coupling to the environment that is inversely proportional to the square root of the environment size. We show that the induced system dynamics has a universal bosonic nature: the same evolution arises from coupling the system to a collection of noninteracting bosonic modes, independently of the microscopic structure of the original environment. This emergent “bosonization” of the environment’s influence results from the scaling of the coupling in the thermodynamic limit and is a manifestation of the quantum central limit theorem. While the effect has been observed in specific models before, we show that it is, in fact, a universal feature.

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• Open quantum systems & decoherence
• Quantum formalism
• Quantum foundations
• Quantum harmonic oscillator