Two-neutron transfer reaction mechanisms in 12C(6He,4He)14C using a realistic three-body 6He model

The reaction mechanisms of the two-neutron transfer reaction 12C(6He,4He) have been studied at Elab=30 MeV at the TRIUMF ISAC-II facility using the Silicon Highly-segmented Array for Reactions and Coulex (SHARC) charged-particle detector array. Optical potential parameters have been extracted from the analysis of the elastic scattering angular distribution. The new potential has been applied to the study of the transfer angular distribution to the 2+2 8.32 MeV state in 14C, using a realistic three-body 6He model and advanced shell-model calculations for the carbon structure, allowing to calculate the relative contributions of the simultaneous and sequential two-neutron transfer. The reaction model provides a good description of the 30-MeV data set and shows that the simultaneous process is the dominant transfer mechanism. Sensitivity tests of optical potential parameters show that the final results can be considerably affected by the choice of optical potentials. A reanalysis of data measured previously at Elab=18 MeV, however, is not as well described by the same reaction model, suggesting that one needs to include higher-order effects in the reaction mechanism.