The spectrum of the Poincar{\'e} operator in an ellipsoid

We reprove the fact, due to Backus, that the Poincar{\'e} operator in ellipsoids admits a pure point spectrum with polynomial eigenfunctions.We then show that the eigenvalues of the Poincar{\'e} operator restricted to polynomial vector fields of fixed degree admitsa limit repartition given by a probability measure that we construct explicitely. For that, we use Fourier integral operators and ideas comingfrom Alan Weinstein and the first author in the seventies. The starting observation is that the orthogonal polynomials in ellipsoids satisfy a PDE.