Standard choices of quasi-circular orbit parameters for black-hole binary evolutions result in eccentric inspiral. We introduce a conceptually simple method, which is to integrate the post-Newtonian equations of motion through hundreds of orbits, and read off the values of the momenta at the separation at which we wish to start a fully general relativistic numerical evolution. For the particular case of non-spinning equal-mass inspiral with an initial coordinate separation of D=11M we show that this approach reduces the eccentricity by at least a factor of five to e<0.002 as compared to using standard quasi-circular initial parameters.
@article{arxiv.0706.0904,
title = {Reducing eccentricity in black-hole binary evolutions with initial parameters from post-Newtonian inspiral},
author = {Sascha Husa and Mark Hannam and Jose A. Gonzalez and Ulrich Sperhake and Bernd Bruegmann},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0706.0904},
year = {2008}
}