  In the solar corona, several mechanisms of the drift wave instability can
make the mode growing up to amplitudes at which particle acceleration and
stochastic heating by the drift wave take place. 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.
However, 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. As a matter of fact, the large growth rates are
typically of the same order as the plasma frequency. The consequent 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. While both of them predict the
stochastic heating, the threshold for the heating obtained from the single
particle analysis is higher. The explanation for this effect is given.
