Collisional damping of surface waves in the solar corona

Abstract

It has been suggested that surface waves may be able to heat the solar corona. These waves can propagate into the corona and supply the required energies, and because they are linearly compressive they can be dissipated by ion viscosity and electron heat conduction. In this paper we evaluate the damping of surface waves by viscosity and heat conduction. For the solar corona, it is found that surface waves dissipate efficiently only if their periods are shorter than a few tens of seconds and only if the background magnetic field is less than about 10 gauss. Heating of quiet coronal regions is possible if the coronal waves have short periods, but they cannot heat regions of strong magnetic field, such as coronal active region loops. However, our calculation explicitly excludes resonance absorption of surface waves, which may play an additional role in coronal heating.