The Ground State Energy of Heavy Atoms According to Brown and Ravenhall: Absence of Relativistic Effects in Leading Order

Abstract

It is shown that the ground state energy of heavy atoms is, to leading order, given by the non-relativistic Thomas-Fermi energy. The proof is based on the relativistic Hamiltonian of Brown and Ravenhall which is derived from quantum electrodynamics yielding energy levels correctly up to order ${\alpha }^2$Ry.

References in corpus (2)

• Stability and Instability of Relativistic Electrons in Classical Electro magnetic Fields
• Lower bound for the ground state energy of the no-pair Hamiltonian

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The Ground State Energy of Heavy Atoms: Relativistic Lowering of the Leading Energy Correction
• The Scott correction in Dirac-Fock theory
• The Scott conjecture for large Coulomb systems: a review
• The Ground State Energy of Heavy Atoms: the Leading Correction
• The Atomic Density on the Thomas--Fermi Length Scale for the Chandrasekhar Hamiltonian