The Ground State Energy of Heavy Atoms: Leading and Subleading Asymptotics

We study atomic ground state energies for neutral atoms as the nuclear charge $Z$ is large in the no-pair formalism. We show that for a large class of projections defining the underlying Dirac sea – covering not only the physical reasonable cases but also ``weird’’ ones – the corresponding no-pair ground state energy does not exceed the one of the Furry energy up to subleading order. An essential tool is the use and extension of Séré’s results on atomic Dirac-Hartree-Fock theory.