Timelike Compton Scattering with CLAS12 at Jefferson Lab

Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs) describe the correlations between the longitudinal momentum and the transverse spatial position of the partons inside the nucleon. They give access to the contribution of the orbital momentum of the quarks to the nucleon spin.
Timelike Compton Scattering (TCS) (γp→γ^∗p'→e⁺e⁻p') is the photoproduction of a virtual timelike photon on the proton, the virtual photon then decaying into an electron-positron pair. TCS is the time-reversal inverse process of Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering (DVCS, ep→e'p'γ). Studies of DVCS and TCS are complementary. Spin asymmetries for DVCS give access to the imaginary part of Compton Form Factors (CFFs, which are related to GPDs). The angular asymmetries of the lepton pairs in TCS allow to access real parts of CFFs. TCS is also an important tool to verify the universality of GPDs.
The CEBAF accelerator and the CLAS12 detector of Jefferson Lab provide the ideal setting to perform a TCS experiment. CLAS12 has started its data taking, with an 10.6-GeV electron beam impinging on a liquid-hydrogen target, in the spring of 2018. This talk will outline the procedures and status of the analysis to extract TCS angular asymmetries and will assess the physics reach of the new CLAS12 data for nucleon-structure studies.