Cluster decay of the high-lying excited states in 14 C

A cluster-transfer experiment of 9Be(9Be,14C → α+10Be)α at an incident energy of 45 MeV was carried out in order to investigate the molecular structure in high-lying resonant states in 14C. This reaction is of extremely large Q-value, making it an excellent case to select the reaction mechanism and the final states in outgoing nuclei. The high-lying resonances in 14C are reconstructed for three sets of well discriminated final states in 10Be. The results confirm the previous decay measurements with clearly improved decay-channel selections and also show a new state at 23.5(1) MeV. The resonant states at 22.4(3) and 24.0(3) MeV decay primarily into the typical molecular states at about 6 MeV in 10Be, indicating a well developed cluster structure in these high-lying states in 14C. Further measurements of more states of this kind are suggested.