Scattering of light from graphene-coated nanoparticles of negative refractive index

Abstract The recent study of the Lorenz-Mie scattering from a graphene-coated sphere is extended to the case when the sphere is of negative refractive index, focusing on the two intriguing phenomena observed previously for a “bare” negative index sphere of sub-wavelength sizes, namely, the non-Rayleigh behavior and the low-frequency resonances. It is observed that while the graphene coating can regulate the non-Rayleigh scattering back towards Rayleigh, manifested with its own low frequency plasmonic resonances in the IR region; the low-frequency peak observed previously can be significantly suppressed with the result rather insensitive to the doping level of the graphene layer. These graphene-induced effects are clarified via a study of the Bohren-Hunt theory in the limit of small size parameters for the negative refracting sphere.