Transversely polarized Timelike Compton Scattering off the proton in Hall C at Jefferson Lab

Generalized Parton Distributions, functions correlating the transverse distribution of partons with their longitudinal momenta, can be interpreted in terms of "3D images" of the nucleon. They can be accessed in hard exclusive processes, such as Timelike Compton Scattering (TCS). This process is measured in the reaction γ(P)->γ*(p)->e+e-(P) (photoproduction of a lepton pair at high invariant mass), where the virtual photon is scattered off a quark, and interferes with another process called Bethe-Heitler (BH). The spacelike-equivalent of TCS, (spacelike) Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering has been widely studied over the past two decades and provided data to parametrize GPD models. However, we still lack experimental data on some GPDs such as the GPD E, which contains information about the nucleon polarization and is needed to study parton's angular momenta from GPDs. We analyzed data in the context of the development of an experiment at JLab Hall C aimed at extracting the GPDs H and E from TCS. We will discuss our goals, our analysis method, and present projections of TCS transversely polarized spin asymmetries for both a circularly polarized and unpolarized beam and their sensitivities to the parametrization of the GPD E.