The problem of distributing two conducting materials with a prescribed volume ratio in a ball so as to minimize the first eigenvalue of an elliptic operator with Dirichlet conditions is considered in two and three dimensions. The gap ε between the two conductivities is assumed to be small (low contrast regime). The main result of the paper is to show, using asymptotic expansions with respect to ε and to small geometric perturbations of the optimal shape, that the global minimum of the first eigenvalue...