GCN Circular 34838

IceCube Collaboration (http://icecube.wisc.edu/) reports:

We have performed a search for track-like muon neutrino events detected by IceCube consistent with the sky localization of the low-significance gravitational-wave candidate event S231018cb in a time range of 1000 seconds centered on the alert event time (2023-10-18T23:40:06 UTC to 2023-10-18T23:56:46 UTC) [1,2] . 
During this time period IceCube was collecting good quality data. A single hypothesis test 
was conducted,  using a Bayesian approach to quantify the joint GW + neutrino event significance, which assumes a binary merger scenario and accounts for known astrophysical priors, such as GW source distance, in the statistical significance estimation [3].  

One track-like event is found in spatial and temporal coincidence with the gravitational-wave 
Candidate S231018cb calculated from the map circulated in the S231018cb-2-Preliminary notice. This represents an overall p-value of 0.003 for the Bayesian search. The p-value 
measures the consistency of the observed track-like events with the known atmospheric backgrounds for this single map (not accounting for statistical trials from multiple GW events). 

Further details are available at https://gcn.nasa.gov/missions/icecube and at https://roc.icecube.wisc.edu/public/LvkNuTrackSearch.

Properties of the coincident events are shown below:

 dt(s)     RA(deg)       Dec(deg)    Angular uncertainty(deg)  p-value(Bayesian)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-24.13   170.53         +11.11           0.53                                  0.0031

where:
dt = Time of track event minus time of GW trigger (sec)
Angular uncertainty = Angular uncertainty of track event: the radius of a circle 
     representing 90% CL containment by area.
p-value = the p-value for this specific track event from this search.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic-kilometer neutrino detector operating at the 
geographic South Pole, Antarctica. The IceCube realtime alert point of contact can be 
reached at roc@icecube.wisc.edu

[1] M. G. Aartsen et al 2020 ApJL 898 L10
[2] Abbasi et al. Astrophys.J. 944 (2023) 1, 80
[3] I. Bartos et al. 2019 Phys. Rev. D 100, 083017