GCN 44048: IceCube-260315A: No Candidate Transients from the Zwicky Transient Facility

Akshay Eranhalodi (DESY), Robert Stein (JSI), Jannis Necker (Leiden University), and Anna Franckowiak (Ruhr University Bochum) report,

On behalf of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen (GROWTH) collaborations: 

As part of the ZTF neutrino follow up program (Stein et al. 2023), we observed the localization region of the neutrino event IceCube-260315A (Zegarelli et. al, GCN 44017) with the Palomar 48-inch telescope, equipped with the 47 square degree ZTF camera (Bellm et al. 2019, Graham et al. 2019). We started observations in the g- and r-band beginning at 2026-03-15 07:45 UTC, approximately 5.4 hours after event time. We covered 93.7% (0.7 sq deg) of the reported localization region. This estimate accounts for chip gaps. Each exposure was 300s with a typical depth of 21.0 mag. 
 
The images were processed in real-time through the ZTF reduction and image subtraction pipelines at IPAC to search for potential counterparts (Masci et al. 2019). AMPEL (Nordin et al. 2019, Stein et al. 2021) was used to search the alerts database for candidates. We reject stellar sources (Tachibana and Miller 2018) and moving objects, and apply machine learning algorithms (Mahabal et al. 2019) . 

No candidate counterparts were detected. 

We do not recover the previously reported candidate counterpart AT 2026fpm (Lipunov et al. 2026, GCN 44023) because it lies outside of the 90% contianment area based on the publicly available probability map of the neutrino event localisation. As the source is also likely a known variable (Fortin et al. 2026, GCN 44026; Feng et al., GCN 44042) it is unlikely to be the neutrino counterpart.

ZTF and GROWTH are worldwide collaborations comprising Caltech, USA; Caltech/IPAC, USA; University of Maryland, USA; University of California, Berkeley, USA; Cornell University, USA; Drexel University, USA; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA; Institute of Science and Technology, Austria; National Central University, Taiwan; OKC, Sweden; DZA, Germany.

GROWTH acknowledges generous support of the NSF under PIRE Grant No 1545949.
Alert distribution service provided by DIRAC@UW (Patterson et al. 2019).
Alert database searches are done by AMPEL (Nordin et al. 2019).
Alert filtering is performed with the nuztf (Stein et al. 2021, https://github.com/desy-multimessenger/nuztf ).