The stochastic heating, well known from laboratory plasma physics where it has been confirmed in numerous experiments, has been completely ignored in past studies of coronal heating. In the present study, and in our very recent works, it has been shown that the inhomogeneous coronal plasma is, in fact, a perfect environment for fast growing drift waves and the consequent stochastic heating. As a matter of fact, the large growth rates are typically of the same order as the plasma frequency. The heating rates may exceed the required values for a sustained coronal heating by several orders of magnitude. Some aspects of these phenomena are investigated here. In particular the analysis of the particle dynamics within the growing wave is compared with the corresponding fluid analysis.
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