The central spin model has a wide applicability. It is ideally suited to describe a small quantum system, for instance a quantum bit, in contact to a bath of spins, e.g., nuclear spins or other small quantum systems in general. According to previous work [R. R\"ohrig et al., Phys. Rev. B 97, 165431 (2018)], a large bath of quantum spins can be described as a bath of quantum harmonic oscillators. But the resulting quantum model is still far from being straightforwardly solvable. Hence we consider a chain representation for the bosonic degrees of freedom to study how well a semi-classical truncated Wigner approximation of the effective model of harmonic oscillators (bTWA) works in comparison with other approximate and exact methods. We find that the bTWA works well for short times, but deviates from the results of other methods for long times. The general message is that the applicability of semi-classical approaches strongly depends on the variables in terms of which the model is formulated. Numerically, we examine the effect of the number of bath spins and of the truncation level, i.e., the chain length.
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