A Method to Determine the Heating Mechanisms of the Solar Corona

One of the paradigms about coronal heating has been the belief that the mean or summit temperature of a coronal loop is completely insensitive to the nature of the heating mechanisms. However, we point out that the temperature profile along a coronal loop is highly sensitive to the form of the heating. For example, when a steady-state heating is balanced by thermal conduction, a uniform heating function makes the heat flux a linear function of distance along the loop, while T 7=2 increases quadratically from the coronal footpoints; when the heating is concentrated near the coronal base, the heat flux is small and the T 7=2 profile is flat above the base; when the heat is focussed near the summit of a loop, the heat flux is constant and T 7=2 is a linear function of distance below the summit. It is therefore important to determine how the heat deposition from particular heating mechanisms varies spatially within coronal structures such as loops or arcades and to compare...