Quasi-circular orbits of conformal thin-sandwich puncture binary black holes

TL;DR

This paper constructs initial data for equal-mass irrotational binary black holes using the conformal thin-sandwich puncture approach, locating quasi-circular orbits and estimating the ISCO, with results consistent across methods and techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a new application of the conformal thin-sandwich puncture method for binary black hole initial data and compares ISCO predictions with existing techniques.

Findings

ISCO predictions agree with excision technique results

Effective-potential and ADM-Komar methods yield consistent ISCO locations

Conformal thin-sandwich puncture data produce reliable initial conditions

Abstract

I construct initial data for equal-mass irrotational binary black holes using the conformal thin-sandwich puncture (CTSP) approach. I locate quasi-circular orbits using the effective-potential method, and estimate the location of the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO). The ISCO prediction is consistent with results for conformal thin-sandwich data produced using excision techniques. These results also show that the ISCOs predicted by the effective-potential and ADM-Komar mass-comparison methods agree for conformal thin-sandwich data, just as they did for Bowen-York data.