Quasicircular orbits of conformal thin-sandwich puncture binary black holes

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Abstract
I construct initial data for equal-mass irrotational binary black holes using the conformal thin-sandwich puncture approach. I locate quasicircular 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.