The final plunge of spinning binary black holes

We present the results of the full numerical computation of the gravitational radiation generated by the evolution of a series of binary black hole configurations with aligned and counter-aligned spins, $s$, with the orbital angular momentum from near the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) down to the final single rotating black hole. While nonspinning binary black holes lead to a final Kerr hole with rotation parameter $a/M\approx0.72$, for the moderate spinning holes studied in detail here the remnant Kerr black formed at the end of an inspiral process have a rotation parameter $a/M\approx0.72+0.32(s/m_H)$, suggesting it is difficult (though not excluded) to end up with near maximally rotating holes from such scenarios. The resulting waveforms have still the same qualitative simple looking of the nonspinning binaries, supporting the idea that a total mass rescaling of the latter waveforms can produce an approximate description for the spinning binary case.