Given a bounded open set  in  (or in a Riemannian manifold) and a partition of  by  open sets , we consider the quantity  where  is the ground state energy of the Dirichlet realization of the Laplacian in . If we denote by  the infimum over all the -partitions of , a minimal -partition is then a partition which realizes the infimum. When , we find the two nodal domains of a second eigenfunction, but the analysis of higher ’s is non trivial and quite interesting. In this paper, we give...