Constraining the N=16 Shell Gap in 17C via Transfer to the Continuum in the 16C(d, p)17C Reaction

Recently, a semi-microscopic structure model has been presented to study the structure of a weakly-bound, two-body nucleus with a deformed core, including Pauli-blocking effects. The model has been successfully applied within the adiabatic distorted wave approximation (ADWA) reaction framework to study the reactions 16 C(d, p) 17 C, restricting the analysis to bound states of the residual 17 C nucleus. In these calculations, the structure of 17 C is described using the recently presented semimicroscopic Nilsson+AMD model (NAMD), considering different Pauli-blocking methods. In the present work, the analysis is extended to unbound states of this nucleus with the aim of constraining the location of the 1 d 3/2 single-particle strength and infer the N = 16 shell-gap. Comparing the measured energy differential cross section for this reaction with calculations in which the position of the 1 d 3/2 orbital is arbitrarily varied, we conclude that a large shell-gap ( > 5 MeV) is required, in agreement with recently reported value from [J. Lois-Fuentes et al. , Phys. Lett. B 867, 139600 (2025)].