Egocentric physics: It's all about Mie

We show that the physics of anapole excitations can be accurately described in terms of a resonant state expansion of standard Mie theory without recourse to the so-called ‘toroidal’ currents that have previously been used to describe this phenomenon. In this purely Mie theory framework, the anapole behavior arises as a result of a Fano-type interference effect between different resonant state modes of the scatterer that effectively eliminate the scattered field in the associated multipole order.