Circular orbits of corotating binary black holes:: Comparison between analytical and numerical results -: art. no. 024007

We compare recent numerical results, obtained within a helical Killing vector approach, on circular orbits of corotating binary black holes to the analytical predictions made by the effective one-body (EOB) method (which has been recently extended to the case of spinning bodies). On the scale of the differences between the results obtained by different numerical methods, we find good agreement between numerical data and analytical predictions for several invariant functions describing the dynamical properties of circular orbits. This agreement is robust against the post-Newtonian accuracy used for the analytical estimates, as well as under choices of the resummation method for the EOB effective potential, and gets better as one uses a higher post-Newtonian accuracy. These findings open the way to a significant merging of analytical and numerical methods, i.e. to matching an EOB-based analytical description of the (early and late) inspiral, up to the beginning of the plunge, to a numerical description of the plunge and merger. We illustrate also the flexibility of the EOB approach, i.e. the possibility of determining some best fit values for the analytical parameters by comparison with numerical data.