The evaluation of heat production from gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) irradiated with radio-frequency (RF) energy has been problematic due to Joule heating of their background ionic buffer suspensions. Insights into the physical heating mechanism of nanomaterials under RF excitations must be obtained if they are to have applications in fields such as nanoparticle-targeted hyperthermia for cancer therapy. By developing a purification protocol that allows for highly stable and concentrated solutions of citrate-capped AuNPs to be suspended in high-resistivity water, we show herein, for the first time, that heat production is only evident for AuNPs of diameters ≤10 nm, indicating a unique size-dependent heating behavior not previously observed. Heat production has also shown to be linearly dependent on both AuNP concentration and total surface area and was severely attenuated upon AuNP aggregation. These relationships have been further validated using permittivity analysis across a frequency range of 10 MHz–3 GHz as well as static conductivity measurements. Theoretical evaluations suggest that the heating mechanism can be modeled by the electrophoretic oscillation of charged AuNPs across finite length scales in response to a time-varying electric field. It is anticipated these results will assist future development of nanoparticle-assisted heat production by RF fields for applications such as targeted cancer hyperthermia.

Although he first published fiction during the fin de siècle with John Lane, publisher of The Yellow Book, Arthur Machen denied a Decadent heritage for his work; nonetheless, echoes of Decadent interests and imagery carried through his fiction long after the 1890s, through to his final novel, The Green Round. Decades later, M. John Harrison’s Viriconium series of novels and stories nodded to and wrestled with the Decadent legacy, while his interest in Machen became explicit with the short story “The Great God Pan” (the title taken from one of Machen’s most famous tales) and the novel The Course of the Heart, built from the earlier story. Harrison was an initiator of the New Weird literary tendency at the turn of the millennium, and one of the books central to that tendency is K.J. Bishop’s 2003 novel The Etched City, which openly drew on Decadent writings and on Harrison’s own use of Decadent material. Attending to writings by Machen, Harrison, and Bishop, we can see ways that Decadent aesthetics and imagery carried forward, finding a home a century later, not in the literary mainstream but in an experimental corner of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.