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Gravitational waves emitted by black-hole binary systems have the highest signal-to-noise ratio in LIGO and Virgo detectors when black-hole spins are aligned with the orbital angular momentum and extremal. For such systems, we extend the effective-one-body inspiral-merger-ringdown waveforms to generic mass ratios and spins calibrating them to 38 numerical-relativity nonprecessing waveforms produced by the SXS Collaboration. The numerical-relativity simulations span mass ratios from 1 to 8, spin magnitudes up to 98% of extremality, and last for 40 to 60 gravitational-wave cycles. When the total mass of the binary is between 20 and 200AiQ, the effective-one-body nonprecessing (dominant mode) waveforms have overlap above 99% (using the advanced-LIGO design noise spectral density) with all of the 38 nonprecessing numerical waveforms, when maximizing only on initial phase and time. This implies a negligible loss in event rate due to modeling. We also show that--without further calibration-- the precessing effective-one-body (dominant mode) waveforms have overlap above 97% with two very long, strongly precessing numerical-relativity waveforms, when maximizing only on the initial phase and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work we study the dynamics of spinning binary black hole systems in the strong field regime. For this purpose we extract from numerical relativity simulations the binding energy, specific orbital angular momentum, and gauge-invariant frequency. The goal of our work is threefold: First, we extract the individual spin contributions to the binding energy, in particular the spin-orbit, spin-spin, and cubic-in-spin terms. Second, we compare our results with predictions from waveform models and find that while post-Newtonian approximants are not capable of representing the dynamics during the last few orbits before merger, there is good agreement between our data and effective-one-body approximants as well as the numerical relativity surrogate models. Finally, we present phenomenological representations for the binding energy for nonspinning systems with mass ratios up to q=10 and for the spin-orbit interaction for mass ratios up to q=8 obtaining accuracies of ≲0.1% and ≲6%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]