Mass-dependent instability of a stochastic oscillator

We study the instabilities of a harmonic oscillator subject to additive and dichotomous multiplicative noise, focussing on the dependance of the instability threshold on the mass. For multiplicative noise in the damping, the energy instability threshold is crossed as the mass is decreased, as long as the smaller damping is in fact negative. For multiplicative noise in the stiffness, the situation is more complicated and in fact the energy transition is reentrant for intermediate noise strength and damping. For multiplicative noise in the mass, taking the velocity to be conserved as the mass is changed, we find that increasing the mass destabilizes the system.