Estimating the Explosion Time of Core-Collapse Supernovae from Their
  Optical Light Curves
  Core-collapse supernovae are among the prime candidate sources of high energy
neutrinos. Accordingly, the IceCube collaboration has started a program to
search for such a signal. IceCube operates an online search for neutrino
bursts, forwarding the directions of candidate events to a network of optical
telescopes for immediate follow-up observations. If a supernova is identified
from the optical observations, in addition to a directional coincidence a
temporal photon-neutrino coincidence also needs to be established. To achieve
this, we present a method for estimating the supernova explosion time from its
light curve using a simple model. We test the model with supernova light curve
data from SN1987A, SN2006aj and SN2008D and show that the explosion times can
be determined with an accuracy of better than a few hours.
