Detecting zero-point fluctuations with stochastic Brownian oscillators

High-quality quantum oscillators are preferred for precision sensing of external physical parameters because if the noise level due to interactions with the environment is too high, metrological information can be lost due to quantum decoherence. On the other hand, stronger interactions with a thermal environment could be seen as a resource for new types of metrological schemes. We present a general amplification strategy that enables the detection of zero-point fluctuations using low-quality quantum oscillators at finite temperature. We show that by injecting a controllable level of multiplicative frequency noise in a Brownian oscillator, quantum deviations from the virial theorem can be amplified by a parameter proportional to the strength of the frequency noise at constant temperature. As an application, we suggest a scheme in which the virial ratio is used as a witness of the quantum fluctuations of an unknown thermal bath, either by measuring the oscillator energy or the heat current flowing into an ancilla bath. Our work expands the metrological capacity of low-quality oscillators and can enable new measurements of the quantum properties of thermal environments by sensing their zero-point contributions to system variables.