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We search for microlensing events in the highly reddened areas surroundingthe Galactic center using the near-IR observations with the VISTA Variables inthe V\'ia L\'actea Survey (VVV). We report the discovery of 182 newmicrolensing events, based on observations acquired between 2010 and 2015. Wepresent the color-magnitude diagrams of the microlensing sources for the VVVtiles b332, b333, and b334, which were independently analyzed, and show goodqualitative agreement among themselves. We detect an excess of microlensingevents in the central tile b333 in comparison with the other two tiles,suggesting that the microlensing optical depth keeps rising all the way to theGalactic center. We derive the Einstein radius crossing time for all of theobserved events. The observed event timescales range from $t_E = 5$ to $200$days. The resulting timescale distribution shows a mean timescale of$<t_E>=30.91$ days for the complete sample ($N = 182$ events), and$<t_E>=29.93$ days if restricted only for the red clump (RC) giant sources ($N= 96$ RC events). There are 20 long timescale events ($t_E \geq 100$ days) thatsuggest the presence of massive lenses (black holes) or disk-disk event. Thiswork demonstrates that the VVV Survey is a powerful tool to detectintermediate/long timescale microlensing events in highly reddened areas, andit enables a number of future applications, from analyzing individual events tocomputing the statistics for the inner Galactic mass and kinematicdistributions, in aid of future ground- and space-based experiments.

VVV Survey Microlensing Events in the Galactic Center Region