Semiclassical Equivalence of Two White Dwarf Models as Ground States of the Relativistic Hartree–Fock and Vlasov–Poisson energies

Abstract We are concerned with the semi-classical limit for ground states of the relativistic Hartree–Fock energies (HF) under a mass constraint, which are considered as the quantum mean-field model of white dwarfs (Lenzmann and Lewin in Duke Math J 152:257–315, 2010). In Jang and Seok (Kinet Relat Models 15:605–620, 2022), fermionic ground states of the relativistic Vlasov–Poisson energy (VP) are constructed as a classical mean-field model of white dwarfs, and are shown to be equivalent to the classical Chandrasekhar model. In this paper, we prove that as the reduced Planck constant $$\hbar $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>ħ</mml:mi> </mml:math> goes to the zero, the $$\hbar $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>ħ</mml:mi> </mml:math> -parameter family of the ground energies and states of (HF) converges to the fermionic ground energy and state of (VP) with the same mass constraint.