  We present the results of a LIGO search for short-duration gravitational
waves (GW) associated with soft gamma repeater (SGR) bursts. This is the first
GW search sensitive to neutron star f-modes, usually considered the most
efficient GW emitting modes. We find no evidence of GWs associated with any SGR
burst in a sample consisting of the 2004 December 27 giant flare from SGR
1806-20 and 190 lesser events from SGR 1806-20 and SGR 1900+14 which occurred
during the first year of LIGO's fifth science run. GW strain upper limits and
model-dependent GW emission energy upper limits are estimated for individual
bursts using a variety of simulated waveforms. We find upper limit estimates on
the model-dependent isotropic GW emission energies (at a nominal distance of 10
kpc) between 3x10^45 and 9x10^52 erg depending on waveform type, detector
antenna factors and noise characteristics at the time of the burst. These upper
limits are within the theoretically predicted range of some SGR models. We also
propose a new method which extends the initial SGR burst search, exploring the
possibility that SGR sources emit similarly in GWs from burst to burst by
"stacking" potential GW signals. We show that gains in GW energy sensitivity of
N^{1/2} are possible, where N is the number of stacked SGR bursts. Estimated
sensitivities for a mock search for GWs from the 2006 March 29 storm from SGR
1900+14 are presented for two stacking scenarios: a "fluence-weighted" scenario
and a "flat" (unweighted) scenario. Finally, we present a method for
calibrating gravitational wave detectors via photon actuators. The photon
calibrators' nominal 2-sigma confidence error bars are currently estimated to
be ~3%. They have provided a valuable check on the official calibration,
uncovering problems that may otherwise have gone unnoticed.
