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.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure. Added discussion of the Komar mass, and slight
modifications for published versio
