Mar. 8, Wed., 10:00am, Room 4220
Laura Cadonati, MIT

``LIGO's Eyes-Wide-Open Search for Gravitational Waves''

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) aims to make the 
first direct observation of gravitational waves. To achieve this goal, LIGO uses
three interferometers of km-scale length, two in Hanford, WA, and one in 
Livingston, LA, measuring differences in length of one part in 10^21, or 10-18m,
one thousand times smaller than the nuclear diameter. The detectors have now 
reached their design sensitivity and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration is 
actively searching for gravitational wave signatures in the interferometers' data. 
In this talk I will present one of these ongoing efforts, the "eye-wide-open" 
search for unmodeled bursts of gravitational waves. I will describe its 
challenges and the methods used to optimize the detection efficiency and to 
suppress the false alarm rate with minimal assumptions on the signal's 
morphology. I will present the most recent upper limit results and discuss
possible future directions for the LIGO burst analysis.