Gravitational Microlensing Event Statistics for the Zwicky Transient Facility

Microlensing surveys have discovered thousands of events, with almost all events discovered within the Galactic bulge or toward the Magellanic Clouds. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), while not designed to be a microlensing campaign, is an optical time-domain survey that observes the entire northern sky, including the Galactic plane, every few nights. The ZTF observes similar to 10(9)stars in thegandrbands and can significantly contribute to the observed microlensing population. We predict that the ZTF will observe similar to 1100 microlensing events in 3 yr of observing within 10 degrees latitude of the Galactic plane, with similar to 500 events in the outer Galaxy (l >= 10 degrees). This yield increases to similar to 1400 (similar to 800) events by combining every three ZTF exposures, similar to 1800 (similar to 900) events if the ZTF observes for a total of 5 yr, and similar to 2400 (similar to 1300) events for a 5 yr survey with postprocessing image stacking. Using the microlensing modeling softwarePopSyCLE, we compare the microlensing populations in the Galactic bulge and the outer Galaxy. We also present an analysis of the microlensing event ZTF18abhxjmj to demonstrate how to leverage these population statistics in event modeling. The ZTF will constrain Galactic structure, stellar populations, and primordial black holes through photometric microlensing.