LIGO's Eyes-Wide-Open Search for Gravitational Waves
Laura Cadonati, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) aims to make the 
first direct observation of gravitational waves, the tiny distorsions of 
space-time that originate from the universe's most violent events, according to 
the predictions of General Relativity. Such detection will provide a fundamental
new tool for the understanding of our universe. 
To achieve its 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^-18 m, 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 "eyes-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.