  Rapidly decaying slow magnetoacoustic waves are regularly observed in the
solar coronal structures, offering a promising tool for a seismological
diagnostics of the coronal plasma, including its thermodynamical properties.
The effect of damping of standing slow magnetoacoustic oscillations in the
solar coronal loops is investigated accounting for the field-aligned thermal
conductivity and a wave-induced misbalance between radiative cooling and some
unspecified heating rates. The non-adiabatic terms were allowed to be
arbitrarily large, corresponding to the observed values. The thermal
conductivity was taken in its classical form, and a power-law dependence of the
heating function on the density and temperature was assumed. The analysis was
conducted in the linear regime and in the infinite magnetic field
approximation. The wave dynamics is found to be highly sensitive to the
characteristic time scales of the thermal misbalance. Depending on certain
values of the misbalance time scales three regimes of the wave evolution were
identified, namely the regime of a suppressed damping, enhanced damping where
the damping rate drops down to the observational values, and acoustic
over-stability. The specific regime is determined by the dependences of the
radiative cooling and heating functions on thermodynamical parameters of the
plasma in the vicinity of the perturbed thermal equilibrium. The comparison of
the observed and theoretically derived decay times and oscillation periods
allows us to constrain the coronal heating function. For typical coronal
parameters, the observed properties of standing slow magnetoacoustic
oscillations could be readily reproduced with a reasonable choice of the
heating function.
