Investigating the exclusive protoproduction of dileptons at high energies

Using the high energy color dipole approach, we study the exclusive photoproduction of lepton pairs γN→γ*(→l+l-)N (with N=p, A). We use simple models for the elementary dipole-hadron scattering amplitude that captures main features of the dependence on atomic number A, on energy and on momentum transfer t. This investigation is complementary to conventional partonic description of timelike Compton scattering, which considers quark handbag diagrams at leading order in αs and simple models of the relevant generalized parton distributions. These calculations are input in electromagnetic interactions in pp and AA collisions to measured at the LHC.