HEAVY ION TRANSFER REACTIONS STUDIED WITH PRISMA plus CLARA

The large solid angle magnetic spectrometer PRISMA coupled to the gamma array CLARA represents a significant step forward in the field of binary reactions at energies close to the Coulomb barrier. With this set-up extensive investigations have been carried out for nuclear structure and reaction dynamics. Via gamma-particle coincidences it is now experimentally possible to measure the transfer strength to specific final states with high efficiency. In reactions with heavy ions, one can populate states of high angular momentum and, at the same, one can probe the population of specific nuclear levels via transfer of multiple pairs. Valuable information about the structure of those states can be then derived from the study of their decay modes. In the present paper aspects of these studies will be presented, focusing more closely on the reaction mechanism, in particular on the properties of quasi-elastic and deep-inelastic processes and on nucleon-nucleon correlations at energies far below the Coulomb barrier. We concentrated on (near) closed shell systems as they allow a better quantitative comparison between experiment and theory.