Relevant heating of the quiet solar corona by Alfvén waves: a result of adiabaticity breakdown.

Ion heating by Alfvén waves has been considered for long as the mechanism explaining why the solar corona has a temperature several orders of magnitude higher than the photosphere. Unfortunately, as the measured wave frequencies are much smaller than the ion cyclotron frequency, particles were expected to behave adiabatically, impeding a direct wave-particle energy transfer to take place, except through decorrelating stochastic mechanisms related to broadband wave spectra. This paper proposes a new paradigm for this mechanism by showing it is actually much simpler, more general, and very efficient.