We introduce a technique to decompose the scattered near field of
two-dimensional arbitrary metaatoms into its multipole contributions. To this
end we expand the scattered field upon plane wave illumination into cylindrical
harmonics as known from Mie theory. By relating these cylin- drical harmonics
to the field radiated by Cartesian multipoles, the contribution of the lowest
order electric and magnetic multipoles can be identified. Revealing these
multipoles is essential for the design of metamaterials because they largely
determine the character of light propagation. In par- ticular, having this
information at hand it is straightforward to distinguish between effects that
result either from the arrangement of the metaatoms or from their particular
design