
Figure 1: The binding energy
versus
in the equal-mass case (
). Left panel:
Comparison with the numerical relativity result of Gourgoulhon, Grandclément et al. [228, 232]
valid in the corotating case (marked by a star). Points indicated by
are computed from the
minimum of Eq. (232), and correspond to irrotational binaries. Points denoted by
come
from the minimum of the sum of Eqs. (232) and (250*), and describe corotational binaries. Note
the very good convergence of the standard (Taylor-expanded) PN series. Right panel: Numerical
relativity results of Cook, Pfeiffer et al. [133, 121] for quasi-equilibrium (QE) configurations and
various boundary conditions for the lapse function, in the non-spinning (NS), leading-order non
spinning (LN) and corotating (CO) cases. The point from [228, 232] (HKV-GGB) is also reported
as in the left panel, together with IVP, the initial value approach with effective potential [132, 342],
as well as standard PN predictions from the left panel and non-standard (EOB) ones. The agreement
between the QE computation and the standard non-resummed 3PN point is excellent especially in
the irrotational NS case.




