Simple procedures to reduce eccentricity of binary black hole simulations

Abstract: We present simple procedures to construct quasi-circular initial data for numerical evolutions of binary black hole spacetimes. Our method consists of using Post-Newtonian theory in three ways: first to provide an initial guess for the initial momenta at 3.5PN order that implies low residual eccentricity, second to measure the resulting eccentricity, and third to calculate corrections to the momenta or initial separation which further reduce the eccentricity. Regarding the initial guess, we compare numerical evolutions in post-Newtonian theory to the post-circular and post-post-circular analytical approximations to quasi-circular data. We discuss a robust fitting procedure to measure eccentricity from numerical simulations using the orbital frequency, and derive from the quasi-Keplerian parametrization at 1PN oder the correction factors for the tangential and radial momentum components required to achieve reduce the measured eccentricity to zero. We first test our procedure integrating PN equations of motion at $3.5$PN where low eccentric initial data is easily obtained, and then apply our method to sets of binary black hole numerical relativity simulations with different mass ratios (q=1,2,...,8), spin configurations and separations. Our set of simulations contains non-spinning, spin-aligned and precessing simulations. We observe that the iterative procedure produces low eccentric simulations with eccentricities of the order (10^{-4}) with only one iteration. The simplicity of the procedure allows to obtain low eccentric NR simulations easily and saving computational resources. Moreover, the analytical PN formulas derived in this paper will be useful to generate eccentric hybrid waveforms.