It is plausible that an accretion disk pumps energy into an outer tenuous layer of its atmosphere to form a high-temperature corona analogous to the solar corona. General features of such a corona, not specific to any model, are discussed, and order-of-magnitude estimates are made for the physical parameters of a corona on the Cygnus X-1 disk. It is shown that a corona with a strong 'wind' (mass loss flux) can produce hard (exceeding 100 keV) X-rays if it is cooled by inverse Compton scattering. An observational test for the presence of such a corona is suggested.
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Liang et al. (1977) studied this question.