DVCS on Polarized Nucleons with the CLAS12 experiment at Jefferson Lab

Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering is the most direct channel to access Generalized Partons Distributions (GPDs) and understand more about the 3D structure of the nucleon, the origin of its spin, and the forces at play within it. The complete extraction of GPDs requires using polarized electron beams and polarized nucleon targets in DVCS measurements. The first polarized target experiment of the CLAS12 program at JLab took place between 2022 and 2023, scattering 10.6 GeV electrons on longitudinally polarized protons and neutrons in hydrogen and deuterium targets. It is of high interest for DVCS measurements as it will allow the target-spin and double-spin asymmetries to be measured for neutrons for the first time. These results will allow the extraction of neutron Compton Form Factors over a large phase space and access the H and E GPDs for the neutron. Combining results on the proton and the neutron will allow for the flavor decomposition of GPDs. Analysis from the experiment is ongoing and preliminary, raw asymmetries have been extracted for protons in a hydrogen target using a dataset that represents around 5% of the total RGC data. The target polarization can be extracted by analysis of (quasi)-elastic events. Contamination from $N$ in the molecular $NH_3$ and $ND_3$ targets can be quantified with sufficient precision. The extracted raw asymmetries show the expected behavior in their $\Phi$ and $t$-dependencies. These results demonstrate the readiness of the analysis tools specifically developed to work with a polarized nuclear target to be applied to the data with protons and neutrons in deuterium, which will soon be available.