  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
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 transition is reentrant for
intermediate noise strength and damping. For multiplicative noise in the mass,
the results depend on the implementation of the noise. One can take the
velocity or the momentum to be conserved as the mass is changed. In these cases
increasing the mass destabilizes the system. Alternatively, if the change in
mass is caused by the accretion/loss of particles to the Brownian particle,
these processes are asymmetric with momentum conserved upon accretion and
velocity upon loss. In this case, there is no instability, as opposed to the
other two implementations. We also study the distribution of the energy,
finding a power-law cutoff at a value which increases with time.
